Post-Racial and Racially Obsessed
Wednesday, July 10, 2013, Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

The Romans had their arenas, Elizabethan England had bear baiting and Obama's America has the trial. HLN has already shot past CNN with wall-to-wall coverage of the latest trial whose defendant is indistinguishable from a celebrity and whose coverage is barely distinguishable from that of the movie premiere.

But in between the usual criminal cases whose defendants seem like failed aspirants for the Big
Brother house or Survivor, reality TV stars who found fame with a butcher knife, are the politically edifying cases. The ones that aren't just meant to humiliate and degrade the participants and the viewers, but to indoctrinate them as well.

It is into this category that the Zimmerman trial falls. It's an involuntary case based on insufficient evidence whose course was compelled by government intervention. And like the tribunals of the French Revolution or the Moscow Trials; it's there to teach us something. And the thing it's there to teach us is racism hysteria.

Racism is the new sex for a creed of politically correct puritans who are obsessed with a new kind of prurience. As the last sexual taboos fall by the wayside, the new taboos are political and the new witch hunts are all about exposing hidden reservoirs of bigotry among celebrity chefs and lurking White Hispanic menaces.

The intimate moral faults that keep a population in a state of conformity and terror are no longer sexual, but political. The new prudery is political and the new hypocrisy is racial, knotted over with double standards and exceptions for the watchers and the elites who are exempt from the occasional witch trial, no matter how many black cats and cauldrons they own.

Racial tolerance has long since become racial denunciation. Tolerance has become paranoia. The fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Of giving the wrong impression. Of failing to be properly guilty for some vague complicity of privilege and oppression. Those fears and guilts must be constantly reinvigorated with fresh doses of trials and denunciations. Public spectacles to serve as reminders that the greatest evil of all lurks everywhere and that we must stand vigilant against it.

The graduate of a modern liberal arts university receives training in spotting and identifying the most obscure forms of bigotry. He isn't taught to spot burning crosses, but to denounce implicit narrative privilege. The microscope that he wields to spot the most obscure forms of bigotry imaginable doesn't really detect bigotry, it manufactures it. It crafts his higher moral ground by exposing the wrongdoing of everyone and everything else.

His or her contemporaries have few skills, except the familiar one from every totalitarian state of denouncing enemies of the state for some trivial act. Having been turned into inquistioners by an educational system that is terrible at producing engineers or scientists, but spectacular at producing politically correct policemen of public spaces, they might as well inquisition.

Bigotry is the bugbear of the moment, but next year it might be salt or short hair. Racism just happens to be easier to rally against. It also comes with the most moral authority points.

The Soviet Union reduced everything to class and built its moral authority to rule around economic redistribution and the classless society. The United States from LBJ onward reduced everything to race and built its moral authority to rule around social harmony. The enemy that disrupts that social harmony is eroding the latest accomplishments in the national social progress program.

The pursuit of bigotry has as little to do with fighting actual racism as witch hunts had to do with hunting actual witches. Real Neo-Nazis and Klansmen can't get arrested in this town. Overt bigotry is boring and actual racists have taken to showing up at courthouses in Nazi uniforms to get attention. . There's no point in hunting a witch who boasts about her witchcraft. There's no sport to it.

The whole point of baiting a bear is to get the bear to react. The Roman arenas wouldn't have lasted very long without gladiators willing to fight. And the entire tawdry spectacle of the trial and the morality mob requires cooperating defendants who care what the faceless mass audience thinks of them and try to prove their innocence.

Taboos by their very nature involve shame. Exposing some secret bigotry, denouncing a man as a bigot on the flimsiest of grounds, involves sport. The bear struggles and fights back. He tries to understand what's happening. He cries and apologizes. There's shame and guilt on display. But take that away and the inquisitioners have nothing to work with.

There is no drama in denouncing a man who has no shame and no secret fears of being dragged out of the crowd to be charged with disrupting its social harmony. Denouncing Andrew Dice Clay and Alec Baldwin, two of the actors in Woody Allen's next movie, is pointless. Neither of the men care. Both have public personas built on being politically incorrect. But denouncing Paula Deen proved to be a rich feast of degradation and humiliation for the politically correct crowd. And power.

The entire sport isn't about racism, it's about power. The witch hunt isn't about fighting evil, it's about turning to a face in the crowd and then dragging them out as a human sacrifice to the collective power of the crowd and the moral authority of the inquisitioners. The victim is denounced for secretly lacking the same commitment to social values as everyone else in the crowd. And everyone in the crowd recommits to those values with a mixture of fear and triumph. Triumph over the vulnerability of another human being and fear that their own hypocrisies, their own little sins, will be exposed.

Mass hysteria of this kind is built on elevating one value above all others. It gives its crusaders the sanction to behave in the ugliest possible ways for the greater good. It silences all dissent through a moral power that isn't truly moral, but is nothing more than calculated hysteria enforced by terror.

--snip--

@/Greenfield Ping @FP123@Sanguine@algernonpj@Palinista@W-Girl

The United States is beset by these "morality mobs" of "social engineers".

"The United States no longer leads the world in space or in many areas of science and technology. Its literature has become forgettable and the great skyscrapers are being built in Asia and the Middle East. But it leads the world in racial hysteria, an obsession as irrational as the satanic sex abuse kindergartens and the witch trials. We can't go back to the moon, but our social engineers stalk the corridors of power with microscopes that claim to peer into the human heart. "

Ya gotta have something to fill up the 24/7/365 news cycle, I suppose . . .

And manufacturing a sin (racism) and then covering its aftermath (the Z. trial) is so much easier and cost effective than - heaven forbid - actually covering something like the one-man wrecking crew a.k.a. Obama.

At least we've got one thing over the ancient Romans:

they didn't have TV cameras.

Thanks for the post and ping.

From the comment section:

Zitat

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Art West said...
Is everyone aware of the politically correct industry's latest product? It's called "implicit bias" or "unconscious bias" and it's about rascism/biases/bigoted beliefs that a person (white, of course) doesn't even realize he or she has.

Imagine the accusations, regulations and lawsuits that can proceed from this perverse little tool. Now the PC crowd can reach right into one's unconscious mind to punish and profit.

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Quote: algernonpj wrote in post #5

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From the comment section:

Zitat

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Art West said...
Is everyone aware of the politically correct industry's latest product? It's called "implicit bias" or "unconscious bias" and it's about rascism/biases/bigoted beliefs that a person (white, of course) doesn't even realize he or she has.

Imagine the accusations, regulations and lawsuits that can proceed from this perverse little tool. Now the PC crowd can reach right into one's unconscious mind to punish and profit.

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Disgusting.

Quote: FP123 wrote in post #6

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Quote: algernonpj wrote in post #5

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From the comment section:

Zitat

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Art West said...
Is everyone aware of the politically correct industry's latest product? It's called "implicit bias" or "unconscious bias" and it's about rascism/biases/bigoted beliefs that a person (white, of course) doesn't even realize he or she has.

Imagine the accusations, regulations and lawsuits that can proceed from this perverse little tool. Now the PC crowd can reach right into one's unconscious mind to punish and profit.

---

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Disgusting.

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"The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak." - Orwell