Regressive Left Pt. 4: Postmodern Pandemonium

Critical theory and postmodern philosophy, which were discussed in the previous section, are not inherently regressive. Neither is the women's liberation movement, the civil rights movement and other causes for social justice that gained traction in the late 20th century. We are a better polity for our valuing of racial and gender equality, and for seriously and honestly scrutinizing our own past, history and even or deepest held philosophical convictions. 

There is an enormous gap, however, between these noble endeavors, which is the face of "transformation" in academia and elsewhere that the public, media and policy makers at all levels saw, and what was actually going on behind the scenes, where far fewer people looked with a scrutinizing eye.  The goal of the emerging political transformation in academia beginning in the late 70s was not merely to make these places more open and inclusive to those who'd previously been excluded, but to remake the very philosophical foundations upon which western liberal civilization rested and at the very least, to turn numerous other mediums, including video game journalism, into bully pulpits from which to convert the privileged heathen into woke privilege checking "social justice" activists. 

Outside the academy, the results of this transformation seemed comical and ridiculous.  Examples are numerous and easy to find in anti-SJW and anti-postmodernist spaces online. The infamous Alan Sokal affair lampooned the excesses of transformational curriculum, as well as exposing its weaknesses. The curriculums of "dead white males" were seen as built upon foundations of privilege and discrimination, even as those curriculums emphasized foundational enlightenment and liberal values upon which the importance of racial and gender equality were based.  All of this talk of science and mathematics privileging the "male" values of logic and reason over the "women's way of knowing" that emphasized emotion and empathy are easy to scoff at.  Not to mention how ironically reactionary is the implication that logic is inherently masculine and emotion inherently feminine. Isn't that kind of thinking what feminists were supposed to be against?

But the underlying issues are more serious, and "transformative curriculums" became the foundation of what has turned out to be a growing threat to liberty and perhaps the very survival of western civilization. It is important, therefore, to look at some of the more important doctrines and how they've driven regressive tendencies we've seen.

Perhaps the most important and dangerous of these doctrines is "Standpoint theory" which asserts that "knowledge stems from social position. The perspective denies that traditional science is objective and suggests that research and theory has ignored and marginalized women and feminist ways of thinking. Conspicuously and tragically absent is the postmodernist admonition against broad, sweeping universally applicable metanarratives. The theory emerged from the Marxist argument that people from an oppressed class have special access to knowledge that is not available to those from a privileged class, and is essentialist and reductionist in the extreme. In the 1970s feminist writers inspired by that Marxist insight began to examine how inequalities between men and women influence knowledge production.

We've all seen footage of SJWs at demonstrations loudly reminding their opponents that "you're a white male!" and otherwise falling back on identity to circumvent argument. This is among the most frustrating aspects of dealing with the SJW and the intersectional social justice left more generally.  This rhetorical, and ultimately philosophical device is founded upon standpoint theory, wherein marginalized or oppressed identity confers infallible moral and intellectual authority, so long as the correct party line is being espoused, of course.

An intersecting concept, if I may borrow the term, is “prejudice plus power” proposed in 1970 by feminist activist Patricia Bidol-Padva in her book Developing New Perspectives on Race: An Innovative Multi-media Social Studies Curriculum in Racism Awareness for the Secondary Level.  Besides being as much postmodern wokeness as I've yet seen in one book title, this has gone on to become another fundamental core doctrine of present day SJW thought, and it is the oft stated notion that women cannot be sexist, minorities cannot be racist and so on. Here, what it means to be prejudiced is redefined in terms of social power, in a self referential, self serving and ideological way. It also gives an easy out for members of so called marginalized demographics to indulge in as much bigotry and stereotyping as they want without fear of social censure.  Critics have called it the bigotry of lowered expectations.

A related concept is the "authority of experience" which relies upon a similar concept of making standpoint on a privilege vs marginalization continuum a determining factor in the evaluation of an individual's speech or conduct. The "experience" even of offense or inconvenience, let alone oppression by a marginalized person becomes equivalent to admissible evidence of racist or sexist conduct if done by a "privileged" person, regardless of their intent.  The speech-act hypothesis, which blurs the distinction between words and actions, was seized upon by these kinds of feminist theorists to assert that so called hate speech, or anything that marginalized people found offensive, was actually dangerous and oppressive, and thus warranted censorship.  Here we have the foundations for the concepts of microaggressions, safe spaces and trigger warnings.

It is all well and good that we listen to those from designated marginalized demographics when they discuss their experiences. There is truth in the notion that it's hard to understand others until you've walked in their shoes. When that's impossible, simply listening is the best that can be done.  This critique is not a call that feminist or critical race theorists be silenced or ignored - that would be hypocrisy in the extreme. 

Rather that we be careful in attributing to the subjective experience of the marginalized the status of moral and intellectual infallibility, and especially of treating their standpoints as license to circumvent essential bedrock liberal concepts - civil liberties, due process for the accused and so on. Or even as a license to act obnoxious, as is so often done in social justice circles. Standpoint theory is deeply flawed and prone to abuse, for reasons that should be self evident, and personal experience is likewise a flawed means of arriving at truth, for reasons best articulated by the social constructionist postmodernists themselves.

It is also worth asking ourselves just whose voices are going to constitute the voices of the oppressed and the marginalized? By the logic inherent to standpoint theory we should ask ourselves if tenured professors in premier educational institutions in first world countries are really the best people to be speaking on behalf of the downtrodden and marginalized? While there's nothing wrong with having the opportunity to get a first class education in such an institution, that seems to me itself the hallmark of privilege. Social class and economics as a factor in pervasive inequality is conspicuous by its absence in much of transformative postmodern academia and associated activism, and is perhaps the one thing about Marx that they'd be improved by adopting. The popular image of the smug, well to do college prof telling the unemployed white male construction worker to "check his privilege" perfectly represents the hubris and hypocrisy of the transformative academy, and smacks of more than just a little psychological projection.

For educated professionals versed in "transformative" theories to graduate from such a college, and move on to acquire an influential position in education, media, tech or other influential field and use said position as a bully pulpit from which to beat less institutionally powerful people over the head with their white or male privilege is an act of audacious hypocrisy that escapes scrutiny largely due to just how vast a scale this kind of behavior occurs on, as the recent Damore lawsuit against Google is one prime example of, among many. The allegations in said lawsuit cover a harrowing list of abuses of power undertaken in the name of "diversity" and justified by its supposed challenge to white male privilege. Notice how the privilege of the all powerful CEO and management over the workers to enable such abuse does not factor into their analysis of privilege.  The use of standpoint theory by decidedly privileged executives and intellectuals to shield their own views from criticism smacks of Lenin's authoritarian concept of the revolutionary vanguard party.

Yet this kind of Leninist ideological institutional capture is precisely what was advocated and practiced by the regressive architects of so called transformative academia.  Peggy McIntosh, who we met previously as the mother of contemporary privilege theories so popular among today's SJWs, is quoted by Christina Hoff Sommers in her opus, Who Stole Feminism?:

I think it is not so important for us to get women's bodies in high places, because that doesn't necessarily help at all in social change. But to promote women who carry a new consciousness of how the mountain strongholds of white men need valley values - this will change society ... Such persons placed high up in existing power structures can really make a difference.

When you get through the woke metaphors, what this really boils down to is the capture of institutions and the diversion of their purpose to the advancement of regressive left ideology. The idea that academia, among other institutions, should remain essentially neutral and promote clear and critical thinking regarding all ideas does not fly among ideologues who view knowledge and the means of acquiring knowledge as being socially constructed, for the benefit of the privileged and the expense of the marginalized.  

And as Sommers describes, McIntosh was but one of a vast network of activists who were very good at this. It was suggested that applicants for positions of influence in the academy and (eventually) outside of it be screened for their ideological correctness.  Again, all of this seems alarmingly reminiscent of the old Leninist concept of democratic centralism and the vanguard party.  Concerns raised by the likes of Jonathan Haidt regarding the leftward swing in academia find their origins in the ideology of McIntosh and her contemporaries as much as they do in broader demographic trends, though Haidt definitely deserves our support and commendation in his efforts to stem the tide. 

Sadly, these are considerations that few in academia and the media have chosen to vocalize, and almost universal appeasement on an institutional level has enabled the growth and empowerment of a decidedly illiberal social trajectory, especially among the younger millennial generation.  Their success in the capture of academia goes a long way to explaining the dominance of their ideology in mass media and its control over the discourse surrounding race and gender relations in the agenda setting institutions of our civilization.

It is a mark of transformative curriculum's success that the glaring problems with this cluster of ideas should require elaboration.  They fly in the face of how we now know the human mind works, which would confirm the postmodern theorist's view that experience is subjective and filtered through the subject's unique psychologically constructed interpretation of experiences and beliefs, of which an alleged "harasser" could not possibly have knowledge.  An educated woman in today's world, for example, duly instructed in feminist theory while in college, could no doubt easily take offense to nearly anything a male could theoretically say or do: a glance being "male gaze", a compliment or even a polite civil greeting becoming "harassment", attraction becoming "objectification" and consensual sex being rape if she later reports "feeling violated" and so on, although feminist theorists will virtually always deny these linkages if actually challenged on them.

Regardless, these concepts had been codified into law as a result of high profile sexual harassment cases from the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which what a "reasonable woman" feels to be offensive and discriminatory, rather than the intent of the presumably white male to offend, discriminate, or abuse institutional power, was to be what determines guilt. Hence the disregard the "believe women" movement had for any notion of due process. 

In 2017 - 2018, the juggernaut gained still more momentum through the #MeToo and #Timesup campaigns. Here we see standpoint theory and the authority of experience deployed when, via the phrase "you're a male, you don't get to decide" is used to justify an unwillingness to differentiate between flagrant abuses of power a-la Harvey Weinstein on the one hand and day after regret or bad sex on the other and a whole gamut of unpleasant but not necessarily coercive sexual experiences in between.

The implications of requiring men to be responsible for the emotional experiences of women in this manner should disturb anybody who's serious about the use of anti-harassment laws to actually eliminate harassment rather than be a club in the hands of women in their relations with men, not to mention extremely paternalistic. Implicit here is the decidedly reactionary notion that men are driven by sex while the morally and aesthetically superior female is above such animalistic concerns, and that women must weaponize access, or lack thereof to sex as a means of controlling and punishing men. All for great social justice, of course.  This extremely sex-negative outlook bodes ill for the future of gender relations, and we're already seeing a tendency towards stark decline in the levels of partnering correlating with age in America and elsewhere.  

While very few regressive feminists would take this to the penetrative sex equalling rape extreme for which such feminists as Andrea Dworkin (who would later deny holding this view) were notorious, perpetual emphasis on women's experience of violation rather than of pleasure as being the norm in heterosexuality led to a dim view of human sexuality.  The outcome, desired I suspect, is to place a chill effect on heterosexual romance that we increasingly see reflected throughout all of society.

The present epidemic of sexlessness in Japan, concerning as it is for demographers and psychologists observing the harmful psychological and economic impact this is going to have, is where these trends are likely to take us, and the recent spate of me too sexual misconduct allegations following the Harvey Weinstein meltdown are not going to help any, and neither are most popular male responses to feminism, such as the MGTOW - men going their own way movement, which often comes across as being the male version of the same thing.  An unlikely outcome of all of this is the mutual respect and equality across gender lines that contemporary feminism so often claims is its goal.

Thus far I've spoken of feminism and gender theory, but many of the same concepts are applicable in critical race theory, queer theory and others like them. Frantz Fanon's views merit a look where race and decolonization are concerned.  Here again, we see mere political reform as being insufficient.  Wholesale cultural change, in which "redemptive violence" is suggested to play a role in exorcising deeply internalized colonization and white supremacy, is said to be what's necessary. 

There is nothing wrong, of course, with a historically colonized nation wanting to return to its cultural roots and reclaim its language and symbols in addition to political independence. However, the Mau Mau tactics employed by Black Lives Matter and the South African Fallist Movement, not to mention the horrific spate of farm murders also in South Africa and finally the deepening poverty in Zimbabwe should all remind us not to view decolonizing struggles and efforts through too rosy a lens.  It is tragic that these kinds of theories may drive people of color and the third world to learn the hard way, just as Europe did in its wars of nationalism and religion, and later with fascism and communism, that liberal principles are not mere social and cultural constructs designed to legitimize the rule of the privileged, but very much the opposite: a bulwark that protects all people, regardless of color or identity, from the terrors of mob and state violence. 

Radical feminism and anti colonial racial nationalism came into their own on college campuses in the 1980s. A part of their success was due to the vacuum left on the left by the decline of socialism and trade unionism during the Reagan/Thatcher era.  Yet they did not suddenly materialize in that time, but rather evolved alongside of the broader new left of the 1960s. And that is where our focus will turn next.

... to be continued in Part 5: Radical Ruckus

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Opposition to the SJWs

The SJW types have peaked in recent years.  They are institutionally dominant - in colleges, mainstream media and so on.  But that actually isn't a good sign for them.  Holding institutional power but lacking in actual cultural vigor is a sign of waning influence.  And don't mistake shrill fanaticism for cultural vigor, they're poles apart.   There's a lot of resentment and discontent with them now.  For most of the 2000s, people like me who were critical of the excesses of political correctness were kind of an odd breed.   The winds of popular opinion and cultural progress were in the sails first of the so called new atheists and their criticisms of conservative Christianity, and then of the massive proliferation of social justice and feminist blogs.  

That's not the case anymore, and the social justice crowd would be in a world of trouble if they didn't enjoy such high levels of ideological protectionism in academia and mainstream media.  Their purity spiralling and fanaticism is reflective of deep seated fear - the tide has turned against them and they know it.

I think that if you compare things to, say, four years ago, there's quite a bit of anger and frustration with the SJWs that simply wasn't there before. In fact, you didn't have terms like SJW or regressive left before, say, 2014 or so.  This was because before then, the kinds of views we associate with the SJWs were hegemonic, at least in their respective theaters of operation, particularly racial and sexual politics.  The hysterics we're seeing out of them now are because they're facing something they haven't faced in a long time, and that's real opposition.  

Thing of it is, the inertia of ideas has a long term effect.  Apparently rising popularity of SJW types of ideas and activism today is in part due to the inertia of their ideas over the decades.  It's not going to collapse overnight.  Kind of like the religious right, it's going to be a long process.  I think you can compare the SJWs of the Obama era to where the religious right was in George W. Bush's time.  Perhaps maximal in terms of actual institutional power, and their supporters were at a level of peak belief and fanaticism.  But the vigor and vitality had shifted to their opponents, and had been for a while.  The religious right was faltering by the late 1990s.  Anyone under 30 in the Bush years was quoting Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens etc. as if they were gospel.  How ironic.  And you're seeing levels of religiosity declining to this day because of it.  The SJWs are, I think, headed in the same direction

So the SJWs peaked in terms of institutional power during the Obama years, and you can see the results of this in the vitriol shown by mainstream media towards Trump.  But the mere fact that this vitriol is now visible and ostentatious is itself a sign that we've turned a corner.  If the SJWs were truly hegemonic, Hillary Clinton would now be president and these issues wouldn't be a matter of controversy.  Shrillness and hysteria is a common reaction of movements when it begins to dawn on them that they ain't gonna pull it off.  

As to the democratic party capitulating to the SJWs, well, would this be the same democratic party that lost, if only by a narrow margin, last November.  The same Democratic party that lost the House in 2010, gone from a 60 seat supermajority in '08 to a 46 seat minority today, many hundreds of state legislature seats and how many governorships?  Twelve is the figure I've seen.  

Now, does this mean the Democrats are going to suddenly make a dramatic change of course?  Of course not.  Again, these kinds of changes take a long time to really play themselves out.  Movements as given over to fanaticism as the SJWs don't give in nearly that easily, and institutional change could well have to wait until the current crop retires or moves on from their positions of influence.  The DLC has been almost laughably reluctant to look long and hard at their policy platform, their ideology and their broader political culture since Clinton's defeat.  It's all still the Russian's fault, the last time I checked.  Thing is though, Clinton's loss was narrow, and it's quite possible that Trump could really blow it and push support back in the Dem's direction.  Indeed, Trump's win has given them a cause to rally around.  A lot will depend on how things go in 2018 and 2020.

There's something to be said for the fact that there's more opposition [to the SJWS] than I'm giving credit for, and it's not always immediately apparent when you're at the peak until you've actually crossed it and started going down again.

There is a lot of opposition, but like I said, it's unorganized, and it doesn't really know how to organize.  That's the countervailing force.  That's the one thing the SJWs really have going for them.  The core of the anti-SJWs, typically net savvy younger white males, are not the types of people that are well disposed to working effectively together over a long term to achieve political goals, the occasional 4chan meme or prank notwithstanding.  

So while I think the SJWs have peaked, they will be around a while yet.  Quite a while.  There's a reason the colleges and most major news outlets are pro-SJW.  The SJWs are directly traceable to the west coast new left of the 1960s.  These guys did not peter out in the 1970s, contrary to popular belief.  They retreated into academia and they did not waste their time when they got there, again contrary to popular belief.  They stopped with the Marxist stance on economics, so the FBI finally left them alone.  They were no longer a threat to the real power after that.  So they didn't matter.  Except when they did.

Look at these French postmodernist philosophers they studied.  Derrida, Foucault and that whole crew.  They have a reputation for being a bunch of unintelligible gobbledygook.  And it was true to a fair extent.  But literary deconstruction is not a wasted skill.  It's why academic feminists are so damn good in flame wars.  They don't even bother wasting their time answering their opponent's arguments directly.  They dive right into the assumption that their opponents are merely defending a position of power and privilege, because that's all human behavior ever boils down to as far as they're concerned, and it drives their opponents - usually 4chan or manosphere types, batty.  Studying that stuff also leads to an understanding of narrative and cognitive framing.  They understand media, and they understand it on a social, economic and psychological level, not just its basic workings.  A lot of this goes back to the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Rudi Dutschke and others had about a long march through the institutions, which ties into their hegemony in academia.  From there, they learned how to look at the way institutions work and how to coordinate their efforts to strategically apply pressure to get what they want.  The ideas of Saul Alinsky and stuff like that.  

Again, to their opponents, typically paleoconservatives, neoreactionaries and the right wing of the so called skeptic community - think YouTubers like Sargon of Akkad and the like, everything I've described above is what they call cultural Marxism.  It's all bad, horrible stuff because it's supposedly Marxism and we all know that didn't work from the history of the USSR.  Well that's just patent nonsense.  Cultural Marxism is a contradiction in terms.  Marx was adamant about the primacy of economic relations and how culture ultimately flowed from that.  

Marx was proven right when this huge shift to the left in academia and the mainstreaming of feminism, multiculturalism, mass immigration and so on coincided with the mainstreaming of neoliberal capitalism.  And it makes sense because rapacious capitalism always needs new markets to expand into, and if women and minorities are going to provide that, then that's what's going to happen.  But the neoreactionaries and the paleocons can't see that.  They're totally fixated on Marx the way the dumb lefties can't get over Hitler.  And what's really funny is that they usually don't have a clue what Marx actually believed.  I suggest Marxist ideas to alt-rightists and they tend to actually like it, as long as it's not recognizably Marx to them.

The SJWs won't be defeated by anything on the right, because a lot of the population doesn't trust the right wing, and with good reason I think, and also because mainstream conservatism doesn't really mind the cultural left, truth be told.  It's a steam valve for dissent, for one thing.  Better a bunch of angry feminists than a revitalized trade union movement, for example.  That would be a real threat to corporate power.  Occupy Wall Street unnerved them, and I think it's kind of remarkable that the SJWs emerged so suddenly into the social media mainstream not too long after that.  

So the left can have the cultural stuff, since it's actually good for capital anyway, and the right keeps what it really wants: a low tax, deregulated economic structure.  Weak unions and so on, as well as a hawkish foreign policy.  A strong capacity to project power in the middle east to protect petrodollar interests.  The deep state is happy with that, they could give a rat's ass about college feminists being oppressed by privileged white males, and are frankly glad, I suspect, that such things are a huge big hairy deal to the left.  The culture wars distract people from what's really happening at the deep state level, and that's where the real action is.  So this is a perfect arrangement for them.

I'm thinking back to the height of the Religious Right... maybe, late 90s, early 00s?  This was the last time the GOP could run on something like the marriage amendment and it was a winning issue for them nationally.  Was it obvious at the time that the religious right was about to begin the decline?  Not necessarily.  The boomers had turned sharply to the right in the 80s and Generation X was also a right-leaning generation.  Only the oldest of millennials had come of age by that time and it was unknown what their voting patterns would be like.

I frankly think the religious right peaked in the late 1980s and kind of plateaued through much of the 1990s.  The 90s were harder on the religious right than you might think.  The big GOP win in 1994 was kind of a last hurrah, so to speak. The Clinton/Lewinsky affair, I think, was an early major signal that moral conservatism was in decline.  There was all kinds of wailing and gnashing of teeth in right wing circles back then over the fact that Clinton was not removed from office because of that.  The death of outrage, I remember conservative pundits calling it.  People just didn't care that much.  It was between Bill, Monica and Hillary as far as a lot of people were concerned.  

And even during the Bush years, this kind of thinking didn't really change all that much.  The GOP was sitting pretty when it came to electoral success, but the culture was slipping away from them and they damn well knew it.  The religious right were soon to lose over gay marriage, which was the death blow for the religious right, I think, though that wasn't finalized until the Obama years.  Sure, the religious right is still around and managed to get one of their guys as VP, but frankly, I think they're about as undead as their purported savior at this point.

Time will tell.  One piece of evidence could be whether the Dems run a Kamala Harris type in 2020 and go all-in on the identity politics campaign again.  An even bigger piece of evidence will be whether it works or not.  And yet even more important may be analyzing demographic trends in 2020 and (more importantly) 2024 and beyond, when the generation after millenials starts voting and we start getting some data on how conservative/liberal this generation will be and what trends will continue/end (is there a name of this generation yet?)

Well yes, that will be big.  A lot depends on what happens in 2018.  A lot more depends on 2020.  The post-millennials are quite conservative from what I've heard, but it's too early to tell, like you say.  As for the democrats, it doesn't look like they're going to change all that much.  The mainstream voices on the US left - the HuffPost, Salon and so on, are doubling down on the intersectional feminism, and so on.  It's hard to tell if that's what the base really believes, or if the privilege checking tail is wagging a much more populist dog at this point.  

As for the intersectional SJWs, that movement is very self destructive.  Women of color are calling out their white sisters for being "white feminists", black cishet males are being called "the white people of black people" and cisgender gay males are being accused of being more misogynistic than even straight white dudes, if you can believe it.  Plus they're lionizing Islam now, with leaders like Linda Sarsour and the like.  Squaring feminism with the circle of Shari'a law is doubtlessly an irrational fool's errand to a rational person, but irrationality has long since passed critical mass, and there's a lot of woke pink hat wearers that are more than prepared to take the whole thing at face value. 

But then, the opposition doesn't win elections.  The incumbent party loses them, so what happens in 2018 and 2020 will have a lot more to do with the performance of the Tweeter in Chief's administration than any kind of shift of the ideological poles that might occur between now and then.  I don't find that a comforting thought.

7 Reasons Why Anything and Everything Should be up for Debate

"What are you?  Chicken?"

I fail to understand why the left in the western world has become so averse to open debate, especially on university campuses.

Are leftists afraid they won't win debates against climate change deniers, creation scientists, race realists, trickle down economists, the war on drugs, "Pray the gay away", alt-right blowhards, holocaust deniers, anti-vaxxers, men’s rights activists, 9/11 truthers, guys who go on about "cultural Marxism" or "women's place is in the home" tradcons?

Collectively, these do not strike me as an especially high bar.  So what gives?

It is rightly asserted that many far right wing ideologies are fundamentally irrational and so appeal to irrational people, and you're not likely to convince their core adherents outright, no matter how good your case may be.  Many also are little more than rationalizations for rank hatred and bigotry.  Others still have been debunked repeatedly and long ago, so to do so again is just tiresome and redundant.   Can’t we all just bury these stupid ideas and move on already?

Nevertheless, here are seven broad reasons why I think controversial reactionary opinions should be debated, or at least deconstructed in public forums. 

1 - You'll bring moderates and fence sitters into the more rational camp.  This happened a lot back in the days when the new atheism, the kind represented by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, went on the rational offensive against right wing Christianity.  I saw it happen online countless times during Bush’s second term in office.  In fact, it's precisely what happened to me.  

Regrettably, progressives are not repeating this prior success with the alt-right movement today. 

No-platforming the alt-right actually contributes to the image they’re seeking for themselves as a force to be feared.  A force to be feared is a force to be respected.  Maybe even a force to seek the protection and allegiance of in uncertain times.   When Hillary Clinton presented the alt-right and its internet icons in terms similar to the way the religious right fear-mongered over rock music back in the 1980s, she virtually handed Donald Trump the presidency.

Contrast this with the scathing deconstruction and ridicule to which the new atheists subjected the religious right.  The liberals - at long last - took the initiative.  Rather than no-platform the religious right, they made damn good and sure everybody heard – from the evangelist’s own mouths – exactly what they believed and how nonsensical and stupid it really was.  Memes that ridiculed religious conservatism – invisible pink unicorns, flying spaghetti monsters and the like, were viral phenomenon. 

Yes, hard as it may be to believe today, it was the progressives who were using meme magic in those days.  That makes Hillary Clinton’s campaign fear mongering and hysteria over a cartoon frog all the more laughable and tragic.   Let’s look at it from a different angle: guys on 4chan were using – among other things - a cartoon frog and an attendant “Cult of Kek” to attempt to revive fascist ideology in order to get Donald Trump in the White House.  The comedy – mixed in with a no-nonsense critique of their antiquated racial pseudo-science - pretty much writes itself at this point.  Had Hillary taken that approach, would world affairs now be different?  

With all due respect to Pepe – I must admit, I do have a soft spot for the guy. I can sympathise with him.  I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of baseless moral panic.  

2 - You avoid the "lure of the forbidden fruit" effect that fringe opinions have with certain kinds of people.  If you explain the reasons why you think the way you do, you prove that you and the political faction of which you're part have nothing to hide.  If you rely instead on getting offended at the mere suggestion that an unorthodox opinion be explored, and pursue options for punishing people who hold such views, you lend legitimacy to the conspiratorial narratives that fringe right (or left) wing views tend to hold and come across as abusing your power.  This may even generate sympathy for those views - people naturally sympathise with the underdog.   

I think the present growth of the alt-right has been due in part to their quite deliberately exploiting this whole dynamic.  Compare this with the so called “Streisand Effect”, when attempts to smear or censor something actually give it exposure and contribute to its success.  Openly debunking controversial ideas, if indeed they are so wrong, takes that wind right out of their sails.

3 - You are conveying respect.  Respect not necessarily for the reactionary or the conspiracy theorist you are arguing with, but for the reasoning capacity of 3^rd parties and any audience such a debate might have.  The kinds of high-minded refusal to debate contentious matters that liberals so often display comes across as patronizing and condescending.  They assume audiences are like small children who need to be protected from potentially "harmful" opinions and too stupid to tell good ideas from bad.  Liberal people especially, with their professed egalitarianism and respect for the marginalized, have no business adopting such elitist views.  

These kinds of assumptions are, of course, true of some people, and those who refuse to change their views to accord with the facts should be held to censure and ridicule.  But surprisingly large numbers of people are put off by smugness, and may not care what you have to say no matter how right you are if you come across as a pompous know-it-all. 

This is especially true when progressives imply, as they often do, that to disagree with them on anything is to be racist, misogynist or Nazi.  Increasingly, people are not taking kindly to the emotional blackmail implicit in this kind of argumentation, and are taking their loyalties elsewhere.  And so they should.  Progressives are not owed loyalty or support any more than anybody else is, and need to stop using the good names of anti-racism and feminism as a legitimizing cover for their own snobbery and propensity to disrespect other people.

4 - It is an opportunity to illustrate what good and bad thinking are and how they work.  This is especially true in educational environments.  Explore the fallacies, and not just straight out logical fallacies.  Explore the deeper psychological appeal that extremist politics and conspiracy theories have, at least for certain personality types. 

Do not assume that the reason people hold reactionary or radical views is always bigotry, stupidity or some kind of vested interest, although any of those may be the case and the use of ideology to rationalize privilege, prejudice or abuse of power should, of course, be explored.  But people’s reasons for believing what they believe are surprisingly complex.  Subtle shifts in mental framing, for instance, can cause the same issue to appear very differently to two different people, and both views may be held and advanced in good faith and with the best of intentions.  It becomes increasingly important to understand this as politics grows ever more polarized. 

There are certainly times when it’s appropriate to call people out for advancing spiteful, hateful or flagrantly self serving views.  But be reasonably sure all other possibilities have been explored before resorting to this, or it is you and your own side  that will ultimately come across as looking vindictive and power hungry when it turns out the victim of your self righteous wrath really was acting in good faith.  Failure in this regard is damaging the image of progressive politics today, at a time when such politics have never been more needed.

The current tactic of moral outrage and no-platforming risks leaving students vulnerable to bad ideas down the road.

5 - It is intellectually honest.  If you've been right 19 times out of 20 in a dispute with your neighbor, that does not mean that you will automatically be right during the 21st dispute and thus have no need to make a sound case.  To believe otherwise is to forsake the very soundness of logic that you're presuming makes you right in the first case.

  

I get the sense that in the Obama years,  progressives were coasting on the winds of earlier success against the evangelicals.  They assumed that because they were usually right in their disputes with the conservatives, that they would always be right in their disputes with the conservatives, and so felt at liberty to dispense with those disputes entirely.  This led to intellectual arrogance and laziness. 

The problem with simply coasting on the winds of prior success is that those winds do not blow forever.  When they stop, you'd better still be able to keep flight of your own accord.  Progressives during Obama’s second term did not consider this.  As a result, Donald Trump is in the White House, the very evangelicals who were in abeyance only a short time ago again have access to the levers of power, and it is now the progressives who are being smeared and ridiculed as hypersensitive politically correct snowflakes.  Tragically, the lesson does not appear to have been learned.

6 – It sets a far better precedent.  Liberals are taking their dominance in media and academia as much for granted as they’re taking their sense of moral superiority.  And in doing so, are casting both away.  Do they really think they will enjoy the advantage of institutional power and media bias forever?

When the right is able to marshal sufficient force to themselves no-platform leftists, the progressives will have no right to complain about it.  Don’t think it can happen?  Surprise, it already has.  McCarthyism, anyone?  The red scare, anyone?  This is what’s so unfortunate about the left’s new found enthusiasm for getting so called racists and homophobes fired from their jobs.  They didn’t like it when socialists and trade unionists were blacklisted for their politics, and rightly so.  

When white male identity politics reaches critical mass, and are able to get leftists fired from their jobs for misandry or anti-white racism, progressive insistence that you can’t be racist or sexist against whites and males because “power plus prejudice” will fall on increasingly deaf ears.  Because guess what?  That line of thought is going to stop working sooner or later.  It will be called out for the self serving sophistry it really is.

You know what they say about those who live by the sword.

7 – Reactionary positions may be right about some things.  While their overall world views are heavily distorted, there’s often a kernel of truth at the heart of them.  This seems especially hard for progressives to deal with.  It’s also especially essential for progressives to deal with, or else they cede whole areas of valid concern to the reactionaries, and thereby give them more fertile soil in which to take root in public opinion.

Mass immigration, especially in Europe, has had serious negative social consequences, as tragic incidents such as the Rotherham Affair make clear.  Islamic theology really does have many retrograde elements, especially around women’s rights and LGBT rights.  Being a white male isn’t always all about power and privilege, especially since most white males are not among the truly rich and powerful.  Men do indeed face disadvantages that women do not, all other things being equal, as any divorced father dealing with the family court system would be happy to tell you.  Sexual liberation has contributed to family breakdown.

Concerns over “globalism” aren’t merely anti-semitic conspiracy theory fear mongering.  Economic globalization and the financialization of the economy have been devastating for the working classes, have decimated organized labor and it wasn’t all that long ago that opposing globalism was top priority for the political left.  It still needs to be.  Left wing thought really has become hegemonic on many college campuses as a result of a long march through the institutions; cultural Marxism so called. 

If progressives fail to acknowledge any of the above, or worse, try to suppress expression of any of the above, it will be their own reputation that suffers in the end.  It is impossible to completely suppress information and ideas in the internet age.  If the progressives do not listen to and acknowledge the legitimate grievances at the heart of many reactionary ideologies, those grievances will then serve to lend legitimacy to the illegitimate bigotry, paranoia and scapegoating that reactionaries build up around those grievances.  And leftists will have no one to blame for that but themselves.

Conclusion – It’s easy to simply dismiss reactionary views as stupid, not being worth the time of serious thinkers, as base fear mongering, bigotry or mere self serving rationalization for privilege and abuse of power.  Too easy, in fact, and a culture of smugness, arrogance and ideological entitlement has set in among liberals, especially in media, in academia and online.  

But it is culture that threatens to undermine the very virtues and principles upon which liberal and progressive world views professes to rest.  More and more people across the political spectrum are simply not accepting the progressive’s sense of entitlement to be agreed with on all things without question or explanation or else racist, misogynist or Nazi.   

Taking the time to marshal the facts and build a case against reactionary views from the ground up is not easy.  Taking the time to advance and defend such a case in a public forum is likewise not easy, and does not guarantee immediate results.  Many reactionaries will cling to outmoded and disproven views no matter how strong the case against them, will argue flagrantly stupid positions in rude, obnoxious ways and shamelessly grandstand on behalf of such obviously shameful ideas.  This is, quite understandably, frustrating.  

But in the long run, progressives have no choice.  Especially in an era of social media, and ease of access to information.  The criticisms of liberal snobbishness are not going to go away just because liberals happen to have access to most agenda setting media and can use it to handwave these criticisms.  Liberals don’t get to be right just because they want to be any more than anybody else does. 

The ash heap of history is littered with pompous elites who mistook what successes they did achieve for an intrinsic greatness that is owed the loyalty of all.  Assuming that one is owed agreement and loyalty today because of successes earned due to hard work yesterday is easy.  Understanding that one must keep doing the work today in order to earn agreement and loyalty tomorrow is hard.  But if progressive values are to continue to have a tomorrow, what is hard is what must be done today.

SJW Grandstanders will NOT go Away on Their Own

Youtubber "Mouthy Buddha" praises the stoicism and resolve of University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson in the face of a noisy SJW demonstration against a talk he recently gave.  Mouthy Buddha commends Jordan for "time and time again setting an example for us" as the video shows him largely ignoring a rowdy group of protesters trying to shut down his lecture.  Mouthy Buddha's video may be viewed here.

These sentiments are echoed in the comments following the video.  

"Jon the Bastard" writes, "I wish I could be as stoic as Professor Peterson. The man is a Legend in the making."

"Mike Stewie" writes, "I agree - Peterson sets the standard. While I enjoy listening to the likes of Bearing & Undoomed; an abusive medium is not the way to engage public interest productively. By arguing rationally and non-offensively we make serious arguments, but we also polarize the conversation in a way that shows SJWs for what they are: spoiled & irrational children."

"quizads" writes, "Peterson has truly become a worthy example of nonviolent discourse. I am moved to tears as well."

Others praised him in almost religious terms:

"Jeremy David Evans" writes, "I also almost cried watching his upload.  Truly, he walks his talk. He is shooting for the Christic ideal and reaching it.  When the Israelites were bitten by their own sins and temptations, Moses placed the bronze serpent on a cross so that all who looked on it would be saved. Peterson has taken up the cross of persecution, gained the spotlight, and those of us that see his truth are ever more drawn into that place of truthfulness. The cost is great, but the reward greater: the resurrection of society."

"Marthin Lukas" writes, "Shit....that was.....Jesus-esque......damn it Prof. Jordan."

I would not condemn a man for being stoic and resolved, and I do find Prof. Peterson's conduct in the video to be admirable.  But sometimes turning the other cheek doesn't cut it.  Sometimes appeasement isn't the answer.  Neville Chamberlain is not remembered as a superior Prime Minister to Winston Churchill, and the Dalai Lama no doubt still waits for the communist Chinese to return to their senses so that he can return safely to Lhasa and resume his duties there.  He's been waiting a while now, and will be waiting a long time yet.

People have been waiting a long time for college leftists to come to their senses.  Political correctness was dismissed as a passing fad in the early 1990s, though the ideologies underlying it go back further than that.  Sure, the Students for a Democratic Society did peter out, but their legacy has not.  Feminist theory and critical race theory are multigenerational now.  The umbrella of ideological protectionism - the equation of criticism of the theories with actual misogyny and racism - has sheltered these theories from real scrutiny or opposition for decades.

Sometimes, a firm and decisive stand is what's required.  The SJWs are one of those times.  We've been waiting and appeasing.  Things only get worse.  It's time for the gloves to come off.  It's as simple as that.

The forerunners of today's SJWs did not go away after Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American mind in 1987.  They did not go away after Dinesh D'Sousa published Illiberal Education in 1990.  They did not go away after Christina Hoff Sommers published Who Stole Feminism in 1994.  They did not go away after the minor humiliation of the Alan Sokal affair in the late 1990s, Rolling Stone's false rape story, and have not gone away after Milo Yiannopoulos's repeated exposure of their campus antics.  

Smugly dismissing them as mentally unbalanced, as crybabies or as special snowflakes is not making them go away.  They will not go away despite the fact their women's studies degrees will not qualify them for good jobs.  They will not go away after being unfavorably compared to the generation that stormed the beaches of Normandy or even the generation that marched for civil rights back in the 1960s.  They have not gone away despite being shown on social media time and time and time again for being fools.  

Criticisms spanning the decades, from libertarian, men's rights, traditionalist, classical liberal or marxist materialist perspectives has done nothing, not one thing, to dislodge them.

Voting conservative will not make them go away.  Neither Brian Mulroney nor Stephen Harper did anything about this during their tenures as Tory PMs in Canada.  Nor did Margaret Thatcher, John Major or David Cameron in the UK. Even if Justin Trudeau was unseated by a Tory, even one so un-PC as Kevin O'Leary come 2020, or were Nigel Farage to (somehow) become PM in the UK in the next general, the smart money is on the SJWs becoming more, rather than less vehement. Stateside, they didn't go away after Nixon won the 1972 election or after Reagan won the 1980 election or after George W. Bush won in 2000.  

The foolishness of those who believed Trump's 2016 victory would prompt a rethink on part of identity politics progressives in academia and mass media must by now be perfectly representative of the oft quoted definition of insanity.  

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

In fact, the title of Mouthy Buddha's video really does say it all.

SJWs are STRONGER Than Ever 2017.

He damn well knows this, and admits it in his own comments section:

The title may seem like hyperbole but it's not. Jordan Peterson's views are a minority within a minority in our university campuses, and although many students do side with him, and show him support, the onslaught from the regressive's truly are stronger than they used to be, because academia is now 100% behind the methods and tactics involved. 

They are vehemently against Jordan choosing not to say certain words, but are ok with students screaming "transphobic piece of shit". 

The following is the first sentence in a statement made by McMaster University: 

"We are 'deeply troubled' that Dr. Jordan Peterson has been invited to speak at McMaster." 

Right. He's too fashy, all the freedom for all and free speech stuff is troublesome. 

Let's all get our heads out of our asses here.  The SJWs aren't going anywhere on their own.  They won't be coming to their senses soon, or ever.  Because what they're doing is working, and they damn well know it.  The SJWs are winning.  It's as simple as that.  Brexit and Donald Trump did nothing whatsoever to change that.  One look at the advance of feminism, gay rights, and so on, especially in cultural institutions like academia and mass media make that perfectly clear.  It's so much easier to just shrug your shoulders and capitulate to whatever the latest demands are than it is to do what Jordan Peterson has done and dig in your heels on a matter of principle.  Especially when, unlike the SJWs, you're pretty much guaranteed to stand alone.

And that's precisely the problem.

If you wish to win a culture war, as the SJWs most certainly do, not standing alone is a fairly elementary principle.  And that's just the first of many things the regressive SJWs know that their shoulder shrugging, "what do you do?" asking political opponents don't.

The campus SJWs understand how grassroots activism and organizing work.  At the very least, they seem able to get names on petitions and participants for boycotts and protests.  They analyze the structures of institutions like colleges and look for the weak points where they can get the best results through the application of pressure.  They gain key positions of authority and instruction within academic institutions and use those positions to establish curriculum, guide research efforts and either allow or hinder the career development of students and fellow faculty depending on whether they tow or oppose the ideological party line.  They also structure their ideologies in such a way as to lend credibility to their inclination to use their institutional authority for ideological purposes.  By making claims that erode the perceived differences between scholarship and activism, for example, or subject to postmodernist deconstruction enlightenment notions of objectivity, neutrality and equality of right.

They study media and media relations, and not just on a surface level.  They know full well that the medium is the message.  They deconstruct literature and understand how language frames thought.  They understand the mythopoetic structure of political thought, and understand how important narrative construction is.  They are fully cognizant of the fact that framing and narrative consistently trump even the most airtight of logical arguments.  These people get degrees in English, psychology, sociology, religious studies, media studies and a host of other fields that delve deep into the workings of the human mind and the operations of social interaction.  While their ideas are flawed in the sense that any ideas that take root and become hegemonic in any closed social system become flawed due to ideological siloing, it certainly can't be said that they are lacking in political shrewdness or are fundamentally stupid.  If the SJWs are so dumb, why are they in charge?

They understand these things, and have understood them for decades.  The results speak for themselves.  In Canada, besides academic and media hegemony, a firmly established deep state consisting of advocacy on behalf of women's groups, aboriginal groups, pro-immigrant groups and so on insures that they control the narrative regardless of the party in political office, and genuine dissent carries with it risks of ostracization, job loss or even an appearance before one of our Orwellian "Human Rights" tribunals, as indeed Professor Peterson is being threatened with.

That's quite the little knapsack of privilege we've just unpacked.  The good news is that there's nothing preventing those with a genuine concern for free speech on campuses and elsewhere from understanding the workings of any of the above either.

The end game for anti-regressives, whatever their stripe, will have to look something like this.  I've already published these, but will do so again, to give an idea of what's possible given time and, more importantly, effort.

Three particularly important goals for enemies of regressivism:

• Requiring that intent to harass or create a “poisoned environment” be proven on at least a balance of probabilities or a preponderance of evidence in order to secure a remedy in court over a harassment or hate speech allegation.  “Privileged” people cannot be held responsible, on pain of professional or even legal consequences, for the emotional states of “marginalized” people, given what we know of how the human mind works, regardless of “social context” so prized by regressive social theorists.

• As a corollary to the above, political opinion and opinion on social issues should be a protected category of legal discrimination, especially in employment, just as race, gender, etc.  It should be especially costly to terminate an employee for expressing an opinion on political or social issues, just as it is for protected grounds for discrimination.  Exemptions to this can be extended if the non-expression of certain views can be shown to be a bona-fide occupational requirement.  There’s plenty of information about these  concepts in fields pertaining to human resources management and employment law.

•  Strong College Campus Free Speech legislation must be passed, preferably at the federal level but at least at the state/provincial level.   It's provisions would include the following:

1. Require colleges to adopt, at the governance level, policy statements that make crystal clear organizational commitment to free expression, and make crystal clear that it is not the university's role to protect students or faculty from ideas they find offensive or disagreeable.
2. The campus must be declared open to any speaker invited by students, student groups or faculty.  Disinvitation of controversial speakers should thus be prohibited.
3. There must be serious consequences for actions that result in shutting down speakers on college campuses or harassment of students and faculty for political reasons, including complicit administration failing to act accordingly in response to such events.  Suspensions for first offenses, expulsion/termination for cause in the case of repeat offenses, and even legal prosecution if warranted.  
4. Independent bodies should be established to investigate student and/or faculty allegations of "ideological gatekeeping", which I define as attempts to block the academic progress or careers of students or staff for political or ideological reasons.  This body would also be emboldened to investigate claims of ideological indoctrination in academic settings.  Remedies could include reprimands or other disciplinary measures up to and including termination (in the case of multiple repeat convictions) against offending faculty members.
5. The legislation itself would contain language cautioning academic institutions against fostering or allowing to be fostered a campus culture that romanticizes violent extremism, direct action, and other militant and confrontational forms of activism.  Honest discussion of the above would be permitted.
6. Strong protections for the due process rights of students and faculty charged under any of the above sections, and strong protections for the rights of student and faculty to engage in peaceful and non-disruptive protest. 

People simply must have assurance of their protection from legal or employment related repercussions for expressing their views if regressivism of all kinds is to be pushed to the margins of society.  If they not already have been, these ideas or ideas like them need to be adopted in your jurisdiction.

The SJWs will not go away by themselves. We must know this.  We must accept this.  This means complete acceptance of the fact that they will settle for nothing less than totalitarian control.  They are indeed getting stronger and getting bolder because they've been successful, for the most part.  It doesn't matter how many people dislike them.

The good news is, it doesn't have to.  If dislike can make the jump into no-nonsense organized and effective opposition, I think we'd all be surprised at just how weak the SJWs actually are.

Sounds Regressive, but OK

"Sounds Liberal but OK" is a self described "radical leftist group" on Facebook that is based around "criticizing and mocking centrist (liberal) thought and concept through shitposting."  SLBOK has a link in its description to a "word bank" wherein its basic ideological precepts or links to them are outlined.

The word bank is a worthwhile read for the glimpse it offers of a lot of regressive left ideology in an almost perfectly distilled form.  Many of your favorite canards are there, along with typically vapid and weak definitions and defenses of these canards. But this one in particular is especially noteworthy, since it seems to be the basis of much of this group's - and the regressive left in general's outlook on relations between "marginalized" and "privileged" groups:

Just how long does one have to spend in the ivory tower in order to cultivate such absurdly reductionistic thinking?  Where does one even begin sorting this mess out?

Of course, whites can be racist towards PoC.  Of course there has been native American genocide, slavery, Japanese internment during WW2, and institutionalized discrimination in the form of Jim Crow laws that have targeted PoC.  None of this is good, of course, and it would be absurd to assume that mere legal equality would completely overcome the legacy of that in so short a time, relatively speaking. 

But the narrative quoted in the SLBOK word bank must necessarily leave out a good deal of history in order to maintain its integrity.  It begins to break down when you stop thinking of "white" people as a pale skinned monolith and start thinking of them the way the were often really thought of throughout history: in terms of their nations of origin.  

I make no apologies for the "whataboutism" I'm about to engage in here, because these questions work towards the undermining of the black-and-white (both literally and figuratively) narrative presented in the SLBOK word bank: but what about the Know-Nothing movement, and its attendant ideology of anti-Catholicism and anti-German and anti-Irish sentiment?  What about the fact that many Irish came to America as indentured servants: not the same as slavery, but hardly a position of power and privilege either.  What about African involvement in the Atlantic slave trade?  What about anti-German sentiment that naturally prevailed during the world wars?  What about anti-Polish sentiment?  These things aren't such concerns now, but there was a time, and it had real consequences.  Prejudice against these once despised groups played a real part in enabling mistreatment, discrimination and exploitation as sweat labor.  As bad as slavery?  Perhaps not, but slavery isn't practiced any more today either.  And what's to be gained by all of this competitive victimhood anyway?

The deeper point being that while racism against PoC has indeed been a historical ill in America, but hardly a monolithic one. Yet today's descendants of Irish immigrants (among others) are not demanding a de-facto carte-blanche to revisit ill will on the descendants of good, proper WASP Americans.  Whites in America are hardly a monolith, and were only ever treated as a homogenous block when it advantaged the elites to do so.  So called "radical leftists," of all people, should know this.  One wonders if it is because it is advantageous to elites today, particularly in academia and mass media, that so called "radical leftists" have now chosen to forget this?

But the problems with the SLBOK word bank's approach to intersectional politics don't end there.  

The entry on reverse racism seems to imply that "judging a man by the color of his skin" is not what is objectionable, but rather the historical and contemporary power to translate that prejudice into actual oppressive and discriminatory policy. This is a strange, and the more one thinks of it, troubling way of viewing racial politics.  For one thing, even if we did live in so monolithically white supremacist a society as the SBLOK word bank asserts we do, why hate the oppressor for the color of his skin rather than for the actual power the oppressor wields, above all, and the self serving rationalization of racial supremacy that is advanced to "justify" this abuse of power?  Not so long ago, most leftists acknowledged that the problem was racism, not white people.  What happened to this?  This relatively recent shift away from hating racism to hating whitey even in the mainstream center-leftist media (think The Guardian or the Huffington Post) should be raising red flags - literally and figuratively - for left leaning people.  This tumblrization of the left is among the most alarming political trends of our time, if for no other reason than that it lends credence to alt-right narratives and enables the far right to win bigly - to win so much they'll get tired of winning - if you catch my drift.

Why is prejudice based on skin color not so bad, nor are power differentials by themselves so bad, but the two together suddenly to become an uber-transcendent evil, against which all double standards and regressivism is justified?

And that all assumes that the SLBOK word bank's assertion that we live in so monolithically white supremacist a society even holds in the first place.  I would not consider it a mark of a white supremacist society that "blacks cannot be racist because prejudice plus power" be canonical dogma in the Universities and in most mainstream media discourse on racial politics.  I would not consider it the mark of a white supremacist society that to be credibly called a racist is among the most damaging allegations that could be made against someone.  If being demonstrably (or not) racist against PoC can result job loss, professional marginalization, ostracization and being the target of harassment or even violence, than I'd say it's a safe bet that we're not so monolithically white supremacist as most on the left would seem to think we are - especially since all of the above applies exclusively to white-on-black racism.

None of which is to say that we're black supremacist either.  That would be a patently ridiculous statement.  There is a soundness to the underlying logic of affirmative action - it's not reasonable to expect immediate recovery and equality for PoC from centuries of discrimination as a result of mere legislated equality of right.  Giving a hand up to those who've been unfairly treated in the past so that they may live their lives on more equal footing with those who've benefited from the unequal treatment in the past is a just and fair sentiment.  Of course, the historical reality is more complex and nuanced than that, but just the same, I'd say we live in a society that has shown itself committed to transcending white supremacy.  To a degree that looking the other way in the face of displays of hatred for whites by PoC is hardly unique to the radical left, but is actually quite mainstream.

It actually sounds quite liberal to me.  But OK.

Only it isn't OK.  It's actually a grave long term threat to both liberalism and radical leftism, and it would well behoove centrists and leftists alike to come to grips with PoC racism towards whites and start condemning it.

Not because PoC presently (or likely will in any foreseeable future) have the capacity to oppress whites in a manner comparable to the manner in which European colonialism resulted in the oppression of PoC.  But because two wrongs don't make a right, however incomparable the wrongs may be in terms of scale and harm done.  Yes, violence by PoC against whites do have "implications."  The implications for white families who lose a father and provider to PoC violence aren't appreciably different than the implications for PoC families who suffer a similar loss at the hands of a white person. Grief knows no color.  People are more than the abstract social categories to which they are ascribed, and those instances in which polities have lost sight have this have always been accompanied by mass bloodshed.

Because real white supremacy - the kind practiced in the pre-civil rights US, in apartheid era South Africa and Nazi Germany was terrible, and should not be trivialized in this manner.

Because it preserves the integrity of anti-racism as a political position.  You either think it's okay to discriminate on the basis of skin color or you don't.  If you think it's okay for some races to discriminate but not others, guess what?  You think it's okay to discriminate based on skin color.  And if you think it's okay to discriminate based on skin color, why should I listen to a word you say when you lecture me on why I shouldn't discriminate based on skin color?  Nothing sinks the credibility of a moral position faster or more thoroughly than this kind of arrogance and hypocrisy.  Just ask any washed up televangelist.

Power differentials between races and between people are vastly more complex than "whites have all the power and blacks none."  While certain overarching trends do hold when looked at from a big picture, macroeconomic perspective, context matters in individual cases.  Put your typical white dude in a boxing ring with Mike Tyson circa 1988, and who has the power in that situation?  Unless that white dude's name was Rocky Marciano circa the early 1950s, I'll tell you right now where my money's lying.  If allegations of racism on a college campus or in a human resources department threaten the livelihood of white but not PoC employees, who has the power in that circumstance?

Historically, it was asserted that the kulaks were a "privileged" class and that the Soviet Union, being a "socialist" society was incapable of being oppressive since oppression was defined as the means by which one class maintained an exploitative relation of production with another, which a socialist society was, by definition, incapable of. Violence carried out by the revolution against its class enemies was handwaved away in the familiar terms of being a "reaction" and "self defense" against power and privilege.  One wonders if SLBOK would regard the tens of millions murdered in the communist world as being less dead due to this line of rationalization?

Of course, there are many circumstances under which all other things being equal, being white would be an advantage, and that these are legitimate issues that should be tackled.  Point is, power differentials in the real world depend a great deal on specific context.  For all the criticisms of "class reductionism" prevalent in social media leftism, it is at least more solidly grounded in political and economic reality than identitarian reductionism is, though all forms of reductionism are inherently limited.

And all of this assumes that merely being lower on the totem pole of power and privilege automatically makes one morally superior in the first place.  This underlying implication that it does seems to be driving politics in increasingly caustic and decreasingly productive directions.  The popular term "oppression olympics" says a great deal about how this politics of competitive victimhood is playing out in actual practice.  But it does more damage than even pitting people against one another across racial or gender lines: it makes real social solidarity - the kind needed to win material benefits and political progress in a capitalist society - impossible.  Radical left groups like SLBOK, of all people, should know this.  It's why leftists began opposing racism in the first place - division of the white and black working classes constantly hampered organizing efforts.  The right's exploitation of white working class's attraction to reactionary politics is an ongoing frustration to the left to this day.  Their subsequent blindness to their own variations of the same divisive character thus becomes all the more frustrating and indefensible.

The sooner the left abandons privilege theory and "power plus prejudice" pseudo academic dogmas, the more effective and credible it will be.  One wonders if this is precisely why corporate backed center "left" parties, media and academic departments seem to like privilege theory as much as they do?

Racism is wrong no matter who does it.  This implies no less opposition to racism against PoC than privilege theory does, it merely prevents anti-racism from being itself a form of privilege for those PoC high enough up on the political and economic totem pole to actually make use of it. Or from being a tool used by academic and media elites at the behest of state and corporate power to promote scapegoating and resentment between the white and black underclasses, further undermining solidarity.  It actually brings anti-racism back into the philosophy of enlightenment humanism and universal human rights that was the source of its credibility in the first place.  Hopefully this can be done before said credibility is completely squandered.

That sounds liberal to me.  And that's quite OK.

The Leftist's Guide to Winning Elections

Can't it be 2008 again?  Or at least some time like that.  That is the question leftists all over the western world today must ask themselves.  Barack Obama was poised to become America's first black president in a landslide victory over John McCain.  And even where nominally conservative parties held office, such as in Canada and the UK, the overall mood was still quite progressive.  The Lehman Bro's meltdown had tanked the credibility of trickle down economics.  Stimulus was the word of the day.

For the social conservatives, things were worse.  Demolishing evangelical Christian dogmas was the favorite sport of the internet, as the works of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins had recently been international bestsellers.  Wall Street was soon to be occupied, and gay marriage destined for legalization.  Of course, there were successes on the right, such as the 2010 emergence of the Tea Party in red state America, David Cameron in the UK or Stephen Harper's conservative majority in Canada, but these just seemed more like a foil for the increasingly progressive and secular status quo.  Remember the debt ceiling fiasco?

Feminism, secularism and LGBT pride ruled the internet, and the old angry white males and the evangelicals were, it was agreed, a diminishing demographic eventually destined for the ash heap of history.  The mere suggestion of racism, misogyny or homophobia was more than sufficient to silence any message board, office or lecture hall into swift submission.  No crystal ball or deck of tarot cards in the halcyon early days of social media could have foreseen Brexit, meme magic, GamerGate or Donald Trump.

As I write this, Trump is poised to take the office of POTUS with a red house and senate.  Right wing, in some cases far right parties surge in the European polls.  Pepe the frog pops up all over social media, and tumblr SJWs with their trigger warnings and safe spaces are now the favorite punching bags of the very kinds of bloggers and YouTubers that not so long ago, it seemed, were trouncing evangelicals.  Even the last great standard bearer of 1st world progressivism, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, has come in for ridicule and criticism for his poetic praise of the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

It didn't have to come to this.  And it doesn't have to stay this way.  It would be quite easy, in fact, for the progressive left to regain the high ground and get the wind back in its sails.  The easiest way to do this might be just to do nothing.  The instant, and I mean the very nanosecond they're sworn in, it will most likely be back to pet issues and fetish causes for the GOP.  Namely, corporate tax cuts, middle east power projection and regional hegemony, and efforts to curb abortion rights.  Not quite what the Cult of Kek had in mind, I'm sure, but did they really think they could challenge the ossified neo-cons of the US deep state that are, for all intents and purposes, there enthroned?  They wouldn't be the first to falter on that assumption.  Hope and change, anyone?

If the progressives want to hasten the process of returning to the White House, and maybe taking back a senate seat or two and a few state governorships, however, here are a few suggestions I have for them:

• There are two kinds of people whom you call racist: real racists, who don't care all that much because you're just a worthless pinko commie to them, and people who aren't racist.  People who aren't racist will get tired of you calling them one sooner or later, so don't.
• The above is also true of people whom you call misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic or any other kind of phobic your lexicon might contain.
• This is especially true of you use any of the above to emotionally blackmail or kafkatrap people into accepting your views on broader political issues.  Or to demonstrate a presumed moral, cultural or intellectual superiority on your part.  Or use them to dodge or sidestep lines of argument that challenge your world view.  Try to refrain from doing these things.  If it would help, consider avoiding news sites and blogs that encourage this kind of behavior, such as Everyday Feminism, Jezebel or HuffPost Women (these being the worst offenders, but by no means the only ones).
• It is incumbent upon you to convince others of the merits of your political philosophy.  It is not incumbent upon others to accept your political philosophy or vote in a manner of your preference simply because you want or feel entitled to it.  This is true even if you have a college diploma, a vagina or dark skin.  There is nothing wrong with having any of those things, but they don't entitle you to other people's allegiance.  Even if those factors make you "marginalized" or you fear the results of an election not going your way. 
• Your political views, stances on social issues, education, marginalized identities or any combination thereof do not make you morally or intellectually superior to others.  I'd recommend you not act as though they do.
• Those same factors do not absolve you of the responsibility to prove as factual any claims you make if you wish to have your claims regarded as fact.  
• Those same factors do not entitle you to obstruct traffic, disrupt classroom, workplace or governmental activities, shut down meetings and speakers you disagree with and act like an asshole towards other people.  
• You'd be surprised at how many people privilege theory and "power plus prejudice" don't wash with.  A considerable number of people quite rightly view such sophistry as self serving rationalizations that smug douchebags use to license their own shitty behavior.  Your marginalized identities do not exempt you from being an asshole when that is, in fact, what you are being.
• People don't really care how many college professors or textbooks told you that any of the above is okay.  Credentializing an ideology and institutionalizing it in academia doesn't make said ideology infallible.  If it did, scientific racism would be true because the university of Berlin taught it as gospel circa 1935 or so.  Your own postmodern philosophies are, perhaps, truer than you'd like them to be in this regard.  In this case, your "knowledge" really is just self serving bias.

I could say more, and maybe even go into ideological and policy matters.  But I really don't think it's necessary.  It really comes down to not being an asshole.  Quite frequently, the advice you'd have been quick to give others regarding any kind of PC related issue, except applied to yourself.  That is the hard part, I realize.  But there's a reason the religious leaders of world history so stressed ideas like "doing unto others as you'd have others do unto you," and "removing first the log from thine own eye ..."  It's not because they believed in some fairy tale sky daddy, as I'm sure you've told yourself when you want to feel superior to churchgoing folks - you know, the ones you so smugly derided because they never practiced what they preached?  Yes, those ones.  It's because it really works.  It shows integrity and demonstrable commitment to your values.  People are drawn to that.  People respect that.  Try it.  I think you'd be glad of the results.