Tortured Souls: Leftism Among Whites as Coping Strategy

For one kind of Leftist – the trendy — beliefs and slogans are mere talismans brandished in order to attract higher social status, like a Native American’s dreamcatcher is supposed to entrap spirits.  A principle like “white guilt” isn’t believed in, it’s just deemed useful for getting ahead of other whites or at least maintaining enviable social rank.

There are of course other Leftists who sincerely believe what they profess, no matter how illogically or counterfactually, such as those who think equality is compatible with evolution because the latter is misunderstood in Lamarckian terms.  The true believers misunderstand, but, unlike the subject of this essay, they don’t rationalize or otherwise self-deceive their way through their politics.

We take note of the kind of white leftist who does whenever we associate leftism with physiological traits.  The mainstream and the alternative Right have noticed that many white leftists are what I will call subnormal for their respective sexes — that is, deficient in either masculinity or feminity.  For instance, a man lacking in size, physical strength, psychological dominance, or competitive drive is likely a subnormal. His female equivalent is mannish or ugly in some other way.

That such unfortunates abound among leftist journalists, activists, or even your Prius-driving neighbor is cause for glee for the mainstream Right, which likes to brag that Fox News anchorbabes — and, more tellingly, Evangelical housewives and Young Republican co-eds — are far more attractive than the likes of Janeane Garofalo.   This joviality distracts from the important, disturbing reality that innate, biological deficiencies of certain whites is a powerful inducement to radical politics, including the taking up of causes harmful to white interests.

The status quo, i.e. “the system,” works well enough for normal to supra-normal whites — women who are OK-looking to beautiful, and men who range manly enough to Adonis-like.  Because it is standard for normals to be treated well, and for the very gifted to be treated very well, neither has the incentive to challenge prevailing ways or mores.

Subnormals’ lot — characterized by ostracization, loneliness, alienation, humiliation or involuntary celibacy — gives them the incentive to work against the  “system” that enforces these indignities.  This motivation persists even if the subnormal knows on some level that his defects, being innate, won’t be cured or alleviated by societal change.

In fact, it is this realization which fuels this kind of leftist’s fanaticism.  The tragedy of reality is so severe that the subnormal is presented an unspoken choice: despair in objectivity, or, in the narrative of Leftism a vocabulary, theories, and moral principles with which he can banish the unhappiest of thoughts.  The subnormal regales himself with a narrative which alchemizes despondency over his unchangeable condition into righteous anger against foes both personal and impersonal, and drives himself to distraction through concrete action against these adversaries.

Leftist theories about observable phenomeon happily sweep away darker explanations.  It’s much more pleasant for a mannish woman to believe that men reject her because the “patriarchy” is “intimidated” by “strong, independent females” than it is for her to consider the truth: men are repulsed by those qualities which she can’t change.

While such a complete fabrication comes in handy , rationales which include part of the truth are valued more because they’re more persuasive.  The subnormal male projects onto confident, successful businessmen the character of his formative years’ bullies, while the subnormal female sees in such villains versions of the guys who rejected her at prom-time, and continue to ignore or otherwise wrong her in her adulthood.  Even if these resentments can be seen as pathetic, they don’t exactly upend reality — today’s CEOs and so forth often were yesterday’s jerk jocks and arrogant prom kings.

On the other hand, projection in the casting of the narrative’s victims is less tethered to reality.  The subnormal sympathizes with the illegal alien or the non-white affirmative action beneficiary because he thinks he and they share an enemy in whites who are winning at life.   He supports amnesty and affirmative action, even though both of which undermine his practical self-interest, and even though the beneficiaries of either don’t reciprocate his camaraderie, solely because these positions provide emotional uplift.  In pressing for these policies, he can avenge himself on conventional white society and glorify himself as the enlightened, hip champion of The Other.

Whether an external enemy is disembodied phenomenon as in males’ alleged panic in response to females with PhDs, or a tangible entity like anti-immigration activists, activities undertaken in opposition to these threats, such as marching in demonstrations or delivering tirades atop soapboxes, get subnormals out of the house, into the sunshine, and into the company of sympathizers.

All of this amounts to Leftism as practiced by the unluckily endowed being symptomatic of mental illness, exactly as the rightwing conventional wisdom says.   Just as the shy person doesn’t manifest their condition solely through the feeling of immense insecurity about socializing but also through the actions of avoiding of social contact and concocting rationalizations like professed superiority over others, the subnormal white’s symptoms begin with rage over physiological deficits and extend like the tendrils of a parasite into the rationalizations and distraction of politics in hostile opposition to the conventional white person society they feel mistreated by, often not unjustifiably.

Rightwingers — in fairness more so the pedestrian variety that gets Fox News airtime — are too often hostile to empathizing with the enemy.  The boring Right wants to believe that winners and losers alike earn and therefore deserve their results in life, as opposed to accepting the unsettling reality that talent and beauty are inherited at conception and supply advantages unconnected to willful acts.  The Right in general needs to do better than this conventional wisdom, which, even worse than being stupid and ignorant, betrays cowardice in the face of ever-growing knowledge about the vast biological component to human potential.

Empathizing with the enemy is putting ourselves in their shoes, even if only to gain advantage; it is not sympathizing with them, that is, acting on their behalf.  While it’s pefectly justified to be annoyed at the bitchiness and misandry of the “horsefaced” Women’s Studies professor, and obligatory to be horrified at what she her allies have inflicted on our civilization, are you sure you wouldn’t act similarly if you we so accursed — not just with ugliness but with the mental torture that follows from it?

We can’t yet change human natures.  We can’t turn a narrow-shouldered dork into a charismatic Adonis, but we can stop literally pushing him into lockers as a teenager, thereby figuratively pushing him into the welcoming arms and ranks of the race-traitors and Alinsky-ites later in his life.  We can’t prevent most of the misery that an ugly woman will assuredly suffer, but we can choose to not worsen it by shunning or humiliating her.

We can’t hope to overcome the Left if we don’t understand the minds of its constituents.  Empathy will allow us to peel from the Left those who don’t need to be in it, whose attraction to the ideology is significantly due to our efforts and lack thereof.

A society that’s kinder to the tragically abnormal is one that will produce less enemies of normalcy. Subnormals are Nature’s victims, but they need not be ours.

Who be job-creatin’ up in here?

Republican politicians defend the rich against supposed “class warfare”-based criticism by extolling them as “job creators,” a compliment which necessarily implies that the non-rich aren’t creating jobs.

The non-rich category includes virtually every immigrant, who the GOP extol as “good for the economy” by increasing demand for consumer goods and depressing the price of labor. If a “good” economy — by say, Karl Rove’s standards — entails Americans having jobs, it follows that immigration must be assumed to ensuring employment for Americans.

The compliment paid to the former group therefore cancels that paid to the latter, and vice-versa. Either even the non-rich are “job-creators” which makes praising the rich as such meaningless, or only the rich qualify as such, in which case immigrants are only taking jobs, not creating them.

America is not a “nation of immigrants”

America is not a “nation of immigrants,” nor can any nation be. Immigrants can’t comprise nations for the same reason pledges can’t constitute frats or that job applicants can’t constitute workplaces — societies are comprised of their members, not of those who simply want to be members.

This is no slight to our ancestors who immigrated. They stopped immigrating – that is, journeying in pursuit of belonging in a nation — for a reason the “nation of immigrants” myth makes us forget: because they obtained what they were after.

Our ancestors did want to remain on the boat that brought them, nor did they want to be typecast as mascots in sepia-toned, tear-jerking images of Ellis Island, which always accompany the myth-makers’ melodramatic intonations as to what America is. The wanted to graduate from the status of those who simply want to belong to this nation, and to that of those who have earned that right.

They succeeded. But the myth won’t admit this — it keeps our forebears trapped in the past, on a crowded boat, forever wandering.

The “nation of immigrants” myth thus diminishes both our ancestors and our nation. It says our forebears who became Americans are still on the outside looking in, and it reduces our homeland to an oxymoron — an organization of outsiders.

The myth is worse than an act of disrespect, however. It is also one of subversion.

If a nation can be comprised of non-members, than membership has no meaning. One of membership’s benefits is ownership of the organization, but if anyone can join, then no one has a greater claim on the society than anyone else, including its rightful owners.

A nation’s only rightful owners are its citizens. Everyone else is either an outsider, or, if on the inside, a mere guest or trespasser. The myth’s disseminators are desperate that we forget these truths, because the American who remembers them will think and act like the owner of a literal house.

He will be no more persuaded that he owes his nation to an immigrant than that he owes his house to the homeless guy across the block. Abuse of nostalgia won’t work on him either — he understands that his grandfather’s one-time status as a non-member doesn’t mean that membership must be given to everyone who wants it.

The American who knows he owns his country is a threat because he will insist on his rights without apology or qualification. He is formidable foe because will see with clear eyes where his interests lie, and where they conflict with those whose entrance into America will come at his expense. In sum, he will prove a difficult victim, as those armed with essential truths always are.

The mythmakers don’t lie to us for the enjoyment of empty semantics. They tell us we don’t own our nation so that they can more easily take it from us.

The most dedicated propagators are either satisfied or overjoyed at the influx of at least 800,000 legal newcomers each year, and the minimum 200,000 invaders streaming in annually, but they also know that these trends are highly unpopular, if so far only feebly resisted, by the American public. So they extend what appears to many well-meaning Americans an olive branch in the form of the myth. In not so many words, they soothingly pronounce, “We may have our differences, but surely we can agree, that America is a nation of immigrants.”

This is no concession. This is no peace offering or step towards a meeting in the middle. It is a pernicious lie about our courageous ancestors, and about us. It establishes a false morality which denies citizens the most fundamental rights of belonging. It is a knife in the back and it will continue to injure us as long as we don’t recognize it as such.

In dire straits, Newsweek turns desperately to Plan B: good-faith reporting

Newsweek‘s latest issue profiles Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who is aptly described as the “intellectual architect of the right’s fight against illegal immigration.”  The piece, authored by Tony Dokoupil,  is remarkably, even strangely,  even-handed.

It relays the expected blather of the SPLC — Kobach is waging “legal jihad” in cahoots with that hatestats hotbed FAIR, they’ll have you know — but theirs is the only pathetic excuse for a counterpoint, and it’s accorded only three sentences.   What’s more, the article goes so far as to allow Kobach a devastating last word:  “In a legal debate, when your opponents turn to name-calling, it’s a good sign you’ve already won.”

The narrative isn’t entirely out of the ordinary.  One passage combines standard-issue snobbery and sincere praise:

But he’s no wingnut.  His path to public life is so pedigreed it makes John Kerry seem rough-hewn. Kobach earned top undergrad honors at Harvard; won a Marshall scholarship to Oxford…got a law degree from Yale… He even won two Masters national rowing titles in the double scull.

(My goodness, we can’t dismiss this Kobach so easily, he might have summered with some dear friends!)

(Harvard!? Yale!? Oxford!? Status token processors overloading…)

But giiven the profile’s overall high merit, I’m willing to forgive this regression, especially because its obliviousness is so amusing.

At this point I have to ask: where are this organ of moribund convention’s editors, and what have the kidnappers done to them?

Legal Immigrants Displace U.S. Workers, Fox News Displaces Inconvenient Truth

A few weeks ago, on January 20, I witnessed an irritating spectacle that underscored my low opinion of the Murdoch Media.

Three Fox News programs – America Live, Happening Now, and The O’Reilly Factor – reported on a recent immigration study.  The research, conducted by Northeastern University and commissioned by Reuters, discovered that an alarming 1.1 million immigrants gained jobs between 2008 and 2010, during which time 6 million Americans lost theirs.

This is the kind of content which blows apart sanguine assessments of immigration’s impact on Americans, so the rest of the corporate media’s disinterest in the study was unsurprising.  Fox News’ treatment didn’t inspire vaulting confidence, however.

O’Reilly inflicted Geraldo Rivera on viewers, who sought to frighten them with the prospect of a vengeful Latino electorate should the GOP strongly support law enforcement.  Happening Now and America Live dredged up and fixated on another inane cliché:  illegals are taking the jobs Americans won’t do.

It’s bad enough that an allegedly “Fair and Balanced” news organization would insult our intelligence with the canard of insufficient humility or work ethic (or desperation) among Americans, or that anyone would supply a paycheck to Geraldo Rivera.  What’s unforgivable is the excess attention given to illegal immigration when the majority — 65% — of the 1.1. million imported workers were legal.  This majority fraction was not mentioned at all on any of the three shows, nor was legal attached to immigration.

Instead, the lede was buried under reminders of illegal aliens’ heroism in taking unglamorous jobs and the dangers of racism.  Fox News questions state sanction across policy areas, especially now that a Democrat is President, but this conveniently scheduled skepticism does not extend to the Mainstream Right’s consensus of “illegal influx bad (but not anything to get lathered up over), legal inundation good.”  This dopey duality is usually enforced by absence of abstract reasoning, here it was fortified by flagrant omission and fevered digression.

All of which makes the network’s astronomical ratings disturbing.  But I’m cheered a little that at least the most viscerally affecting number – 1.1 million imported competitors – was stated by the morning programs, both verbally and graphically, and more so by the optimistic assumption that Americans exhausted after a long day of attending diversity seminars are simply choosing the least bad offering on an otherwise intolerable menu.