[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
I've been telling myself for twenty years that America’s ongoing Cultural Revolution couldn't get any worse. But year by year it has gotten worse. The Red Guards now control all our major media outlets, including of course Social Media, and the entire educational system, public and private, from kindergarten to the Ivy League. This new Biden Administration has radicalized the federal government, too: the judiciary, the agencies, even the military have all been put in the hands of Red Guards.
What is it, this poisonous weed, this kudzu smothering our culture and silencing some of our smartest and most eloquent voices?
Well, if you've been paying attention, you'll know that a central concept in the revolutionary mindset, a central target of the Red Guards, is whiteness.
So, in hopes of improving our understanding, let's take a short trip down Anti Whiteness Lane.
My starting point here: a group discussion broadcast by MSNBC on Morning Joe, June 8, 2021. There were five people in the discussion, four whites and a token mulatto lady named Mara Gay. Of the four whites, two were MSNBC Woke Bots whose names are vaguely familiar to me; I don't know who the other two were.
The mulatto lady, Ms. Gay [Tweet her], is a prominent Regime Media journalist: a columnist at the New York Times and a member of that newspaper's Editorial Board.
That's pretty damn good at age 34. Given her color, we are of course bound to suspect that Ms. Gay was raised to that height like a sailplane by warm thermals of Affirmative Action.
We shouldn't hold that against her, though. If you or I had a touch of the tar brush and saw the opportunity to attain a high six-figure salary by taking advantage of ruling class Goodwhites hating on working and middle class Badwhites, perhaps we'd seize that opportunity too.
Permit me to explicate yet again what's going on in our culture. It's a Cold Civil War between two big groups of white people: Goodwhites, who have good, Correct, humanitarian opinions, and Badwhites, who have bad, wrong, hateful opinions.
Nonwhites are sometimes handy as auxiliaries, to groom the horses or dig field latrines. But nobody of any importance cares what they think or listens to what they say. Their main purpose is to serve as tokens of Goodwhite virtue.
Self-identifying blacks like this mulatto lady from the New York Times are given prestigious jobs and extravagant salaries by the Ruling Class elites as a way to emphasize Goodwhite goodness. When Badwhites mock them, as I'm doing here at some length, that just illustrates Badwhite badness. Goodwhites consider blacks to be sacred objects; to mock a black midwit like Ms. Gay is blasphemy.
The principle of tokenism here is so entrenched in our culture nowadays, it's seeped out from the Goodwhite zone into the Badwhite borderlands.
Take Tucker Carlson, for example, who is hated hated hated by Goodwhites, but who would never never never invite Jared Taylor on his show, or Colin Flaherty, or Stefan Molyneux. The opinionators Carlson does invite on his show include a high proportion of nonconformist blacks, people like Candace Owens and Robert Woodson.
God bless them all, I mean really—or as Tucker would say, sincerely—but the proportion is way more than the thirteen percent Black share of the U.S. population. Disparate Impact there, Tucker. Let's see some equity!
So yeah: there was this MSNBC group discussion. The sense of the meeting was that those Badwhite protestors who had put up their feet on Nancy Pelosi's desk and taken selfies in the Senate chamber should be publicly boiled in oil, and then shot.
To be fair, though, the discussion ranged wider than that. There was much talk about the need for an investigation, to be carried out by the federal government's spotlessly impartial intelligence agencies, its conclusions then approved by that same government's unimpeachably independent Justice Department.
And of course, the root causes must be dealt with.
What are the root causes of the horrifically violent assault on our republic perpetrated on January 6th last?
Why, Bad Thoughts!
So once the investigation has been completed and approved, and the perpetrators properly punished, there needs to be Thought Reform.
Ms. Gay, the mulatto lady, waxed eloquent:
The reality is here that, er, we have a large percentage of the American population—I don't know how big it is, but we have tens of millions of Trump voters—who continue to believe that their rights as citizens are under threat by simple virtue of having to share the democracy with others.
Um, I think as long as they see Americanness as the same, as one, with whiteness, this is going to continue. We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy; but how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness? Until we can confront that, and talk about that, this is really going to continue.
I was on Long Island this weekend, visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with, you know, er, explicatives against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and, some cases, just dozens of American flags, which is also, you know, just disturbing, because essentially the message was clear.
It was: "This is my country, this is not your country. I own this."
And so until we're ready to have that conversation, this is going to continue.
Pickup trucks! With explicatives against Joe Biden on the back!
Poor Ms. Gay must have been quaking in her two thousand dollar Balenciaga boots.
As a longtime resident of Long Island, I should offer a few explicatives concerning our social geography here.
If you know anything about Long Island, you probably think of it as leafy upmarket suburbs, populated by commuters into New York City. Yes, there is some of that, but much more that is not that.
The westernmost fringe of Long Island is actually part of New York City; it's the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.
If you head east from there you cross over into Nassau County, which is leafy upmarket suburbs, mostly. Continuing eastwards, you then cross over into Suffolk County, which embraces the entire eastern two thirds of the island, and is the home county of your genial explicator here.
Suffolk Country is a mix. The western part, adjacent to Nassau, is kind of Nassau lite: leafy suburbs, but lower down the class scale and less expensive, just on account of being further from Manhattan. The far eastern part is the famous Hamptons, where super rich Wall Street and showbiz types have their twelve-acre summer homes.
In between those two ends of my county, though, between the pleasant suburban western end and the extremely tony eastern end, there's a forty mile stretch of downmarket small towns and villages, and some farmland still.
Parts of it—little towns like Mastic, Shirley, and the county seat at Riverhead—could be out in the Midwest, or even Appalachia: few blacks, lots of garden signs for Trump, the gun range where I practice my mediocre shooting skills, bait'n'tackle stores, and—yes!—pickup trucks with gun racks, American flags, and explicatives against Joe Biden on the back.
The main political name here: Congressman Lee Zeldin, one of the more reliably pro-Trump Republicans. On immigration related votes in Congress, NumbersUSA scores him as a career grade A, a grade B for recent votes (that's 2019 and 2020), and an A plus for votes in this congress—pretty darn good.
You can see why the guys with pickup trucks vote for Lee Zeldin, but why do those Goodwhite showbiz and finance types out in the Hamptons allow themselves to be represented by such a shameless Trumpist? Well, (a) they're not actually out there in the winter months when most of our voting takes place, and (b) Congressman Zeldin is Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel, so he likely gets a pass on that.
So my guess would be that the New York Times lady, Ms. Gay, who tells us she was visiting a friend on Long Island, passed through the Appalachian zone. I doubt her friend actually lives there; people of her class don't patronize shooting ranges or bait'n'tackle stores. The friend probably lives out in the Hamptons.
Still, just driving through and seeing all that Trumpish Badwhiteness must have been traumatizing for the New York Times lady.
Let's just be thankful, on her behalf, that she didn't have to stop for any reason. She might have been lynched!—or, at the very least, have had a few explicatives shouted at her by us gap toothed hillbillies of Suffolk County.
I'm spending so much time on this tiny story because it encapsulates, and perhaps actually explicates, so much of our present Cultural Revolution.
Just listen to Mara Gay's language there, for instance—the clichés of Wokeness. I can't hear these Woke Bots without groaning and wincing at the stilted predictability of their diction.
To call them "bots" is hardly an exaggeration. I could write code to produce the stuff that they extrude. Well, I could if I had a COBOL compiler …
So Ms. Gay started right off there with: "The reality is …" That's a reliable indicator that what is about to be said has nothing whatever to do with reality.
Sure enough, the lady tells us that Trump voters believe that their rights as citizens are under threat by virtue of having to share the democracy with others.
Are they wrong to think so, when those "others" control well-nigh all the commanding heights of our culture, and can get you fired from your job if you say out loud something at odds with their stupid, crazy ideology?
And by the way: just how willing were those "others" to share the democracy with Trump voters—those "others" strove for four years to delegitimize Trump's presidency, and their media stooges stifled all criticism of Joe Biden and his family in the run-up to last year's election?
And then, Ms. Gay wants to separate America from whiteness. Why? America was founded by white people. They fought and died to found it. Eighty some years on, they fought and died in a war that ended race slavery.
Every social advance was won by white people—all the things Progressives like Ms. Gay are supposed to support. The outlawing of child labor? White people. Universal schooling? White people. Labor unions for fair wages? White people. Female suffrage? White people. Social security? White people. Decriminalizing of sodomy? White people.
Does Ms. Gay not want any more social progress?
Every technological advance, likewise—all the things that made our lives more fruitful and secure.
Does she wish the fruitfulness and security to stop increasing?
It was white people who hired you in at the New York Times, lady, to improve their social credit scores by darkening up the editorial board a bit.
Do you really think you'd have a six-digit salary in Ghana or Uganda, with no virtue-signaling Goodwhites to lift you up?
And on and on. One word I knew would show up was "conversation." Sure enough: [Clip: And so until we're ready to have that conversation …]
Of course, the last thing these totalitarians want is to have a conversation. I could introduce the New York Times to several well-read, well-educated, mild-mannered and thoughtful people, including even some academics, who think more or less as I do, and would be glad to pen an Op Ed for the paper, at the usual freelance rate.
I'm available myself, if the Board is interested in hearing my side of the national conversation … which of course they are not.
But in fact, the New York Times defended Ms. Gay's distress at seeing all those American flags. Tweet from them, Tuesday evening:
Her argument was that Trump and many of his supporters have politicized the American flag.
That doesn't even make sense. It's like saying that McDonald's has commercialized the Golden Arches symbol. Well, of course they have: McDonald's is a commercial enterprise, duh.
A national flag is the emblem of a polis, a self-governing state. You can't politicize it: it's already political.
You can of course burn it. If you catch a person doing so, however, that person is way, way, w-a-a-a-a-y more likely to be a New York Times reader than a Suffolk County redneck driving a pickup truck.
That's all I have, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention; and a reminder to you—and also to the New York Times Editorial Board, although I'm sure they don't need a reminder—that Monday is Flag Day.
Yes; we deplorables out here on Long Island will all be flying the flag with pride.
I strongly advise Mara Gay to stay home on Monday, to avoid another distressing experience.
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
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