Sarah Jeong and her defenders in the media truly have given America a gift. Where once it was only dark speculation that media elites, at best, are ambivalent toward openly genocidal and bigoted statements about white Americans, now we are certain that these sentiments exist.
We know, too, that the most common defense of these sentiments—that they cannot possibly lead to any sort of bad situation, because the privilege of whites is simply too impregnable for attacks on them to land—is deeply flawed. Anti-white rhetorical excesses can and do lead to terrible human rights abuses, and are often used to justify them, particularly in countries with weaker economies and non-white majorities such as South Africa.
For the New York Times, a paper with a global reach, to normalize such rhetoric by placing someone who spews it on their editorial board at the same time they blacklist people for much tamer statements about other races is cavalier and uninformed at best. Further, it suggests that our elite are already prepared to make excuses in case of third world style interracial violence against white citizens. As I noted at the end of my last piece in this series:
[W]hat South Africa shows us is something grimmer: namely, a society where elite status is such a blinder on the wealthiest people of one race that they willingly ignore policies and behaviors that approach genocidal character against what Dickens would have called “their hungry brothers in the dust.” A society where an arrogant elite assumes that its status is so impregnable that they can tolerate hate speech, violence, and persecutory policies explicitly directed at all people like them, just because they assume their own privilege is so great that tolerating that behavior is magnanimous. In other words, a society where Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” is inflicted not by one race against outsiders, but by one race against others like themselves out of sheer indifference, contempt, or desire to reinforce their own status.
This is not only an attitude that we have to fear here, but an attitude I believe already exists among today’s elite. In this piece, I will attempt to establish the existence of this attitude, to explain it, and to provide a warning about how it could become increasingly problematic in the face of future American demographic trends.
Anti-White Sentiment is Real
Let’s start with establishing this worldview’s existence. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, a #NeverTrump acquaintance of mine made the following complaint about President Trump’s successful in-roads with the white working class, particularly in the Second Congressional District of Maine:
The thing that saddens me about this is that I’d rather these people vote Democrat so that they don’t get a say in the Republican party. Better yet, that they had no home at all.
He continued, “They’re like the Palestinians in Gaza. Neither Egypt nor Israel wants them or benefits from having them. Likewise, ‘white working class’ Trump voters and both major parties. It would be better for everyone if they were ghettoized into their own little insignificant faction.”
Normally, I’d have dismissed this as the out of touch ranting of one bitter crank. Surely, not even #NeverTrump could be this tone deaf, right?
Wrong. In the time that followed, no less an entity than Bill Kristol ranted that the “lazy” white working class should be replaced by immigrants who weren’t “spoiled” by American standards of living. Leftists, meanwhile, have been even more cruel, claiming that any sort of care for the white working class is “racist,” and that those who voted for Trump were motivated solely by xenophobia and bigotry, not by any form of economic anxiety that might deserve empathy, and that akshually, the white working class were more likely to vote for Clinton so neener neener neener.
Perhaps MTV was the most blatant in its contempt, blaming Trump’s rise on “white tears”—a far Left mocking phrase meant to imply that the sorrows and concerns of white voters should be treated not only as irrelevant, but are also contemptible, particularly when compared to the concerns of nonwhites. Meanwhile, Melinda Byerley, founder of the Silicon Valley-based company Timeshare CMO, described middle America as “a shithole with stupid people,” and accused the people living there of being violent and racist.
This level of elite contempt for a struggling group of their fellow citizens is not normal, and it is not remotely healthy. Elites are meant to set an example in society: that’s the point of having elites in the first place. When the population at large no longer sees elites as legitimate, and has a pretty damn good point, that’s a problem. When the elites respond by treating the population at large as if they’re the ones who are illegitimate, that is catastrophic.
What Are the Origins of Anti-White Sentiment?
So how, exactly, did we get here? To understand this, we must look to that most controversial piece of social science, The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Many dismiss the book as a piece of racist, pseudo-scientific crankery, but for our purposes, the section of The Bell Curve that we have to look at has nothing to do with race.
At the end of the book, Herrnstein and Murray warn of the following tendencies that are likely to accrue from the way America educates and socializes its “cognitive elite”:
1. An increasingly isolated cognitive elite
2. A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent
3. A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution
“Unchecked,” Herrnstein and Murray warn, “these trends will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top, restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose. Among the other casualties of this process would be American civil society as we have known it.”
In other words, that impregnable social privilege that Jeong’s defenders are talking about may not be whiteness at all, but intelligence.
What are the the ways in which this might manifest? Murray and Herrnstein warn: “We fear that a new kind of conservatism is becoming the dominant ideology of the affluent—not in the social tradition of an Edmund Burke or the economic tradition of an Adam Smith, but ‘conservatism’ along Latin American lines, where to be conservative has often meant doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansion on the hills from the menace of the slums below…The new coalition is already afraid of the underclass.” Especially those that live in “shitholes full of stupid people.”
Who in particular will suffer from this? The white underclass. Herrnstein and Murray again: “Much of white resentment and fear of the black underclass has been softened by the complicated mix of white guilt and paternalism that has often led white elites to excuse behavior in blacks that they would not excuse in whites. This does not mean that white elites will abandon the white underclass, but it does suggest that the means of dealing with their needs are likely to be brusque.”
Brusque, as in, get out of Garbutt, you stupid hick.
Where all of this ends up is with the creation of what Herrnstein and Murray call the “custodial state,” which they describe this way: “a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business…It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the state.”
And the main reason why we may be headed toward this? Elite education, but not of the kind you may be imagining. Rather, the problem is how elites are educated before they reach those few institutions that act as incubators for elite students.
One of Herrnstein and Murray’s recommendations, for example, is that gifted children should still mingle with their average peers socially, but educationally should be in classes that are designed to challenge them as much as regular school challenges an average student. This would teach intellectual humility, whereas the current educational approach leaves gifted students in classrooms with people who, to them, must look incomprehensibly stupid, thus breeding a sense of contempt in the gifted portion of the population from a very young age.
That contempt likely deepens given the resentment that this same treatment engenders among the average or below average. The advocacy group Supporting Emotional Needs for the Gifted (SENG) reports that gifted children are often the victims of bullying or teasing, and are sometimes chastised for their gifts even by teachers. Imagine the future leaders of America becoming hardened by this kind of treatment for 18 years, only to be thrust into globalist, multicultural elite schools, where for the first time they feel safe and appreciated by people like them. Why would they have anything but contempt for the people they grew up with, and by extension, the vast majority of their fellow citizens?
Moreover, how desperate would they be to retain membership in this new, elite clique that, unlike so many others, suddenly wants and nurtures them? Particularly among immigrants or minority students, the drive would be especially strong, hence why even ostensible conservatives like Reihan Salam can write conflicted pieces about why “white bashing” is really a tool of assimilation for gifted minority students, who are perceived as more edgy and interesting by their presumptively white peers for doing it.
How desperate must all but the most socially secure among them be to maintain this status above the people who they learned to despise: those bullying, stupid, racist, violent hick normals, by any means necessary, no matter how cruel and cavalier? After all, on some level, it grates on them that they are not just accomplished, but also lucky: in all likelihood, their gifted brains were nurtured by healthy food rather than lead filled water, they were born to parents who chose to have them, and they were thus raised by parents with the resources and maturity to love and nurture their own gifts.
And with that anxious realization of their luck comes the guilt that privilege theory offers. And so, they think, why not bash “white privilege” if you’re one of the chosen few? If all white people have it, even the stupid ones, then surely it can’t be worth having?
The cognitive elite surely don’t need it. Unlike whiteness, intelligence really does confer an impregnable, inarguable privilege among its holders, and it’s a much more exclusive one than simple whiteness. If someone needs privilege based on nothing but their skin color, doesn’t that suggest they’re inherently worthless?
Yes, the logic of white privilege is inseparable from the logic of white pride—after all, if all whites are guilty for the sins of their ancestors, then all white people are also responsible for the greatness of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mozart, Verdi, Locke, Hobbes, Aquinas, Nietzsche, Mill, Wollstonecraft, de Pizan, and indeed, for all the ideas that drive the struggle against injustices like those of the past.
But for the elite, this is surely an easy point to dodge: after all, why should that kind of white privilege be conferred on Joe Bob from Garbutt? He doesn’t even know who any of those people are! He’s not a worthy heir to their greatness. But the great, multicultural, globalist elite of Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, New York, Washington, London, Paris, and Brussels surely are, regardless of their skin color.
The Imminent Dangers of Anti-White Sentiment
When America’s social policy and its elite institutions are controlled by people with this mindset, then exactly the sort of thing we saw in South Africa can easily sneak up on us. The banality of evil does not just look like lowly German prison guards shrugging their shoulders and shoveling ashes at Auschwitz. Sometimes it looks like bowtied policy wonks in DC smoothly defending policies that cut their perceived inferiors out of society with the casual cruelty of an Ivy League Secret Society, or the New York Social Register.
Yet still, gnawing at the back of their minds, these elites know they are failing their mission to be elites: to set an example for their beleaguered fellow citizens, and to help them. But because they can choose which friends to have, which food to eat, which city to live in, which car to drive, which people of which political persuasion to date and marry, and sometimes even which child to raise thanks to technology, they also want to choose their own underclass, and ideally, that means an underclass that is pliant, that cuts their lawns and nurses their children without complaint, that may bring crime and drugs and problems to other people, but never to them, and above all, that never fancies that it has the right to elect someone to represent its interests over theirs. And if the rednecks all have to die out so that this “coalition of the ascendant” can rise, hey, it’s not exactly genocide if you just cleanse the stupid ones, is it?
The Left, and the contemptuous (and, ironically, relatively monochromatic) elite which increasingly forms their constituency, are sure they will get this wish: if not now then in a few decades. After all, by 2043, when white Americans constitute only a plurality of America rather than a majority, we’ll finally have the multicultural paradise they all dream about, right? After all, as Sarah Jeong put it, “white people have stopped breeding. You’ll all go extinct soon. This was my plan all along.”
But come on, she doesn’t mean them. Just the stupid ones. Just the poor ones. Just the racist ones. Just the ones who they have nothing in common with. Sarah Jeong and her ilk won’t cancel them, even if they are the “worst wypipo in the world,” right?
In short, like the privileged white South Africans who hide behind the walls of their privileged urban compounds and fiddle while the farms burn and the farmers’ children are boiled alive, the editors of the New York Times offer platforms to the imitation Mugabes of the world because their presence is a fashion accessory. Like Leonard Bernstein hosting the Black Panthers, they think they are too rich, too fashionable, and—yes—too privileged to have anything to fear when white people are canceled.
It will, after all, just be the white people who remind them of an ugly truth: that what they have, they owe more to luck than to merit. The luck to be born into families that save, that still possess both parents, that do not struggle with opioid addiction, that still have all their teeth, that postpone pregnancy, albeit not through chastity. In short, the luck to be born to parents who voted for liberals but lived like reactionaries. And so that they will never be confronted with the face of what they could have been, nor of their hated responsibility as elites to lead by setting an example they cannot live up to, they hire pink haired Crazy Rich Asians who bypassed the very quotas their gentry fellows set up in order to blame the victims of their own failure.
And why not? A false elite will always consent to the cleansing of a genuinely afflicted underclass. After all, those who rise from such crucibles of adversity are likely truly to deserve elite status and, in so doing, tear down their castles of mutually reinforced delusion. It is the same dream as all feckless, decadent, failed aristocrats share: to kill the peasants to avoid moral obligation to them, but simultaneously to retain their status as non-peasants. We owe Sarah Jeong a debt of gratitude for tipping their hand.
Now we know the hour of pitchforks and torches is at hand.
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