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New World Order Title: Minority Wars: Why The Next Ten Years Will Set Everyone Against Everyone Activists marched into the room chanting protest songs before taking the stage in front of a bemused OMalley to demand concrete commitments on police violence. Never mind that OMalley and Sanders are, among presidential candidates, by far the most sympathetic to the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement: because theyre white, they cannot be trusted, and deserve to have whatever theyre talking about shoved off the agenda by thugs with placards. It may sound racist and bizarre to be suspicious of candidates like Sanders and OMalley on the basis of their ethnicity alone, but when you consider the primacy of identity politics in the progressive movement today, it really isnt that surprising. Since the 1970s, social psychologists have been aware that emphasising differences between groups leads to mistrust and hostility. In a series of landmark experiments, the psychologist Henri Tajfel found that even wearing different-coloured shirts was enough for groups to begin displaying signs of mistrust. So guess what happens when you tell everyone that their worth, their ability, their right to speak on certain subjects and shudder their privilege is based on what they were born with, rather than any choices theyve made or who they are? Its possible that feminists mistrust the likes of OMalley and Sanders because theyre male. Or gay progressives mistrust them because theyre straight. Or trans activists mistrust them because theyre cis. This is what the future of progressivism looks like: blacks fighting gays fighting lesbians fighting trans fighting everyone else. Its the iron law of victimhood-driven identity politics. Someone has to win, and everyone else has to lose. Identity politics is universally attractive because it enables failures and weaknesses to be spun as the products of oppression and historical injustice. But for legacy castes, it can be humiliating and deeply unfair. Take MTVs White People, for instance: an hour of television designed to produce discomfort in those with the wrong skin colour. Safe to say, itll be a while before we see Black People on our screens. But it also pits minority group against minority group. If the last ten years in the public square were defined by women ridiculing, criticising and demeaning men, the next ten are going to be even more depressing, and even more socially divisive. Welcome to the era of Minority Wars. It sounds laughably ironic, but the modern progressive movement has argued itself into a position where people can be discriminated against on the basis of gender, skin colour and orientation. Thats why you hear dismissive and in some cases even vituperative comments about straight white males in the media today: men are being ridiculed for things they cannot change about themselves. And its the political left doing the discrimination. The future of the progressive movement will be akin to the nightmarish community of grievance-bloggers on Tumblr, where minorities, both real and imagined, engage in an endless competition for supreme victimhood status. You can already see it happening on social media and in spats between celebrities, such as this weeks hair-pulling contest between Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Katy Perry. Taylor Swift has made the mistake of being white, so other white middle-class people pretend to hate her as a form of virtue-signalling. Theyre telling the world what kind, sensitive, racially-aware and hip people they are by slamming Swift, and everyone is desperate to get in on the act. Gawker, The Guardian and The Atlantic have already turned on her with racially-charged allegations not forgetting to point out shes a bad feminist for having the temerity to disagree with another woman, especially a black one. White guilt and the synthetic outrage of Twitter mobs is harnessed by these publications for fury clicks. Whats really happening is that the self-described social justice icons of our generation are driving people apart and pitting minority against minority for profit and for their own twisted amusement. The consequences for Left-wing politicians and media figures to the new Minority Wars will be disastrous. Ordinary people know this is a cruel spectacle cooked up by bored, spoilt, rich white middle-class bloggers in New York, and they see the damage it does to relations between ordinary blacks, gays and transsexuals. As happened at the last election in the United Kingdom, that anger will be expressed at the ballot box. Before that happens, though, here are some of the skirmishes you can expect to see over the next ten years. TRANSSEXUALS V. DRAG QUEENS This has led to the banning of drag queens from performing at Scottish Pride events, to make them a safe space. Whats next? A trans man taking umbrage next time they see a woman wearing a trouser suit? In the future, perhaps women will be prohibited from wearing so-called boyfriend blazers, sweaters or jeans, and society will comply with strictly gendered clothing rules in order to protect trans people from distress, in turn robbing us of our current increasingly liberal attitude towards the fluidity of gender. I predicted all of this in May 2014, but it gives me no pleasure to see that I was entirely right. BLACK WOMEN V. WHITE GAYS The fact that a student body believes it reasonable to ban mannerisms might sound ludicrous, but thats just how angry the black girls were at having their culture and vernacular appropriated by lisping white dudes who believe that being called gay boy at school gives them a monopoly on oppression. Except, wait, no: it was white people tabling the motion. (Admittedly, the article that kicked it all off was written by a black female student in TIME.) Sassing your friends at brunch with ghetto put-downs doesnt make you Rosa Parks, but it doesnt make you David Duke either. The next logical step would be to ban white girls from getting cornrows and of course thats another dimension to Minority Wars: the ridiculous idea of cultural appropriation. TRANSSEXUALS V. CISGENDER FEMINISTS No concord will ever be reached between these equally thin-skinned, self-obsessed groups. WHITE GAY MEN V. ANYONE ELSE IN THE LGBTQQIAROYGBIV* SPECTRUM There was recently a furore over the absolute invisibility of people of colour at Pride events, with some even accusing the gay community of white-washing the rainbow. Gay men are the masculine oppressors of the LGBT community. They, like the straight white men before them, will eventually be ejected from polite society. I predict a split occurring, with white gay men stripped of their LGBT status, relegated to allies and forced to forfeit all rights to their victim narrative. The new LBT community will be led by a mixed race non-binary pansexual who prefers the pronoun xhlee. BI-CURIOUS CRIPPLES V. GAY BARS BREADLINE BETTIES V. THE MAN Being on benefits is not a shameful compromise of dignity for the new dole chic crowd, but a point of pride. This country owes me, they proclaim defiantly. Dont even think about challenging them; theyll hit you with all of the resentment and foul language they would reserve for their dad. If hed stuck around. INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISTS V. THE WHITE ONES Old-school feminists like Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer have come under particular pressure from the newer intersectional wave, who accuse them of being transphobic, dismissive of WoCs (which, when you think about it, sounds alarmingly like wogs) and too sex-positive. Early in 2014, the grievance brigade took to Twitter with the hashtag # RIGHT-WING GAYS V. ISLAM APOLOGISTS AND THE TERMINALLY ANXIOUS LEFT-WING GAY ESTABLISHMENT A group of gay men in Sweden has been accused of racism for promising to bravely march through a majority-Muslim area in the name of gay pride. You might think that Pride was all about sticking it to socially conservative homophobes, but apparently being racially and culturally sensitive is more important than the risk of being stoned, beaten or beheaded in your own country. Dont say you werent warned: Muslims will always rank higher than gays in the Lefts dysfunctional leaderboard of oppression, however disgusting Islamist attitudes to women and homosexuals may be and however many building they blow up. THE WILDCARD: INVENTED IDENTITIES If youre boring, you can just pretend to have a mental health problem. Self-diagnosis is on the rise, and even doctors have started to give up and let people believe theyre ill. Its become a common sight to see white, privileged activists talking at length about their depression, or their Twitter PTSD. Its even more useful in Europe, where the state lavishes the disabled with extensive welfare payouts. If youre more creative, you can join the growing community of trans-racial people, which includes luminaries like Rachel Dolezal, Godfrey Elfwick, and me. Or perhaps you want to be an otherkin an animal trapped inside a humans body. Indeed, BuzzFeed recently had a submissions call for essays on invisible illnesses. Im a bi-polar bear, your professional bio could read. Fibro-queer, says another. So you see, theres no reason to fret. Even if youre straight, white, and wealthy, theres always some way to claim youre being oppressed and at least make a good showing. Let the Minority Wars begin! Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
#1. To: cranky, All (#0)
I am male lesbian and proud of it. Where's my stuff?
#3. To: SOSO (#1)
Take a number. Get in line.
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