Mirage

Day after day, week after week, month after month ... the figurative volume of the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd escalates. They express their "outrage" in myriad ways, some simply comical, others rather more repugnant. A laughable example has Rosey O'Donnell and a group of Broadway singers performing songs of outrage on the streets outside the White House. A more repugnant example is an Antifa (a.k.a., leftist thugs) crowd that screamed at and threatened a black female, conservative writer as she ate breakfast. But I digress.

Conservative historian Victor Davis Hansen eviscerates those progressives who have convinced themselves that they are morally, intellectually, and emotionally superior not only to Trump voters but to virtually everyone who resides in red states in the center and southern reaches of the country—about half the U.S population. He notes the example of Sarah Jeong, a recently hired NYT writer who has taken viciously anti-white positions on Twitter. Those positions are racist, except they can't be, because ... white privilege. Jeong claims her tweets were satire. Yeah, right, sort of like David Duke's racist comments were, what? Ironic?

Hansen writes:

Academic dogma postulates that white people cannot be the victims of racism, and such banal white demonization has now seeped into the larger liberal commentariat. With that bias comes the twin notion that one can smear the white working classes with impunity. [Politico reporter Marc Caputo [who referred to people at a Trump rally as toothless rubes], however, was not brave or stupid enough to visit a Trump rally and to suggest to the crowd around him to get to a Clear Smile clinic.

If you are a non-white purveyor of such prejudice, venom like Jeong’s is contextualized through the lens of compensatory historical grievances. Someone’s grandfather mistreated your grandmother, so you can invert and then replay the roles with impunity. Or less charitably, life’s disappointments are always due to past cosmic injustice, not one’s own perceived tragic shortcomings or bad luck or just cruel fate.

If you are an elite white liberal, you are a twofer: virtue signaling your identity politics bona fides, while psychologically squaring the circle of your own privilege. Those who ridicule less fortunate white others for their supposed racial privilege—themselves often the products of old boy networks, elite upbringings, inherited perks, prep schools and parental leveraging—end up as the privileged smearing the non-privileged for their privilege ...

Is such ignorance of an entire class because of, or in spite of such, elite training?

Does the university-bred cursus honorarium have room for real-world experience beyond the campus and laptop?

Has Jeong ever worked welding alongside the grandchildren of Dust Bowl diaspora to adjudicate their actual skin-colored advantage? Did her class and gender studies work at Harvard Law constitute a tougher curriculum than a 12-hour shift at Denny’s? Is the soybean jack-of-all-trades farmer really denser than the Yale English major?

A final irony. In answer to the now hackneyed question, who or what created Trump? All these purveyors of class and racial prejudice need only look in the mirror.

As the volume of the TDS crowd increases, a single feeling permeates the atmosphere—contempt. As I've mentioned in an earlier post, people react poorly when they feel contempt. In fact, it's not at all unusual to feel anger, maybe even outrage. There's only one thing, though. The outrage by those who feel contempt is justified and real, but it hasn't yet surfaced. If it does, the faux-outrage TDS crowd will see their dreams of political power disappear like a mirage.