The downfall of Dinesh D'Souza

[DIDM]

I see. And why do the media, leftist professors, and the entertainment industry believe it?

They have an agenda?

 

[Bunk Moreland]

Dinesh was one of the guys I used to read regularly as a young conservative.

Over the past few years I was thinking "has he always been this nuts and I didn't see it or did he go nuts?"

Looks like a combination of both.


https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/567233/?__twitter_impression=true

Dude has always been a can.

 

[Devout Pessimist]

I see. And why do the media, leftist professors, and the entertainment industry believe it?

It has become rather fashionable to blame people with white skin for all of the world's problems these days.

 

[Jack V Savage]

It has become rather fashionable to blame people with white skin for all of the world's problems these days.

Yeesh. We're going around in circles here. At some point, there's someone who believes this genuinely, right? Why do you think they do?

 

[Devout Pessimist]

Yeesh. We're going around in circles here. At some point, there's someone who believes this genuinely, right? Why do you think they do?

There are plenty of people who genuinely believe in white privilege for various reasons. The issue is that the vast majority of whites who do believe in white privilege are not going to willingly sacrifice what they have to benefit someone who is not white. The more important question is why should whites make unreasonable sacrifices for past transgressions that they had absolutely nothing to do with?

 

[Jack V Savage]

There are plenty of people who genuinely believe in white privilege for various reasons. The issue is that the vast majority of whites who do believe in white privilege are not going to willingly sacrifice what they have to benefit someone who is not white. The more important question is why should whites make unreasonable sacrifices for past transgressions that they had absolutely nothing to do with?

That's not the issue we're discussing now. For people who genuinely believe it, what do you think the reason is? What set of facts leads them to that conclusion? I think if you're saying that they're being led astray somewhere, you have to know that.

 

[Devout Pessimist]

That's not the issue we're discussing now. For people who genuinely believe it, what do you think the reason is? What set of facts leads them to that conclusion? I think if you're saying that they're being led astray somewhere, you have to know that.

I will quote Shelby Steele:

Author Shelby Steele on race relations, equality in America

Shelby Steele: Well, when you think about it black American culture evolved over three and a half centuries. Every minute under which they [Black Americans] lived under oppression and they adapted to dealing with the fact that those freedoms were going to be cut off. They had to somehow make a life within all of those restriction, and they did. Part of the - one of the - I think black American culture is nothing less than heroic. I mean, they evolved - look at the - you know, the contribution like music and so forth. They achieved great things.

...

[White Guilt] keeps feeding whatever blacks are doing is not helping them, thinking of themselves as nothing more than members of a group, of protesting and so forth. It's white guilt that keeps feeding that. What is white guilt? We always - we think - well, I wake up in the morning and you feel guilty about black Americans? No. White guilt doesn't have anything to do with actual feelings of guilt.

White guilt is the terror of being seen as a racist, as a bigot that now pervades American life. All of our social policy, our culture, everything is touched by this anxiety in most of white America. Understandably given America's history that they are vulnerable, they have this vulnerability to being disarmed of moral authority.

...white guilt causes this drive to prove and establish innocence, and so then we have a whole generation of black leaders who do one thing, and one thing only, milk white guilt. And we're at a moment, I thought this protest [Kneeling in the NFL] was telling in that regard, kind of pointed in which culture maybe turning because it was a fruitless protest. It achieved absolutely nothing.

The essence of American liberalism, I think is the - again, the pursuit of innocence. Innocence of specifically the ugly American past. And that is why, because I am free of that ugliness and innocent of it, that is why you should vote for me. That is why you should let me change this aspect of the university system. That is why you should let me do any number of other things, not because I have better ideas, that I am a better problem solver, but because I offer this identity of innocence, which is now the, I think, big political problem that we have not identified up to this point.

Hillary Clinton and her deplorable statement, now famous, as a perfect example of saying, "These people are bigots and racists. I am innocent. You vote for me, you prove your innocence. I offer you an identity of innocence." Being liberal, being left is more an identity than anything else. This is the way I think of myself, as a decent civilized human being and those other people are contemptable, and so it works on a cultural level.

 

[Devout Pessimist]

 

[Jack V Savage]

I will quote Shelby Steele:

None of this is an answer to the question. If you want to understand the position, look at the history of housing policy, "black codes", relative wealth levels (controlling for education and even income), and studies on hiring practices. That's not a comprehensive list of the areas to investigate that would lead people to that conclusion, but it's a significant start. As I've said from the start, agreement is not required. Informed disagreement is actually better than blind agreement and much better than blind disagreement.

 

[Devout Pessimist]

None of this is an answer to the question. If you want to understand the position, look at the history of housing policy, "black codes", relative wealth levels (controlling for education and even income), and studies on hiring practices. That's not a comprehensive list of the areas to investigate that would lead people to that conclusion, but it's a significant start. As I've said from the start, agreement is not required. Informed disagreement is actually better than blind agreement and much better than blind disagreement.

Steele's comments are an answer to your question. He states the reason for white guilt and shows the consequences. Steele explains that there is an understandable collective guilt among whites because of the sins of the past. A brutal past that today's whites had nothing to do with but will still go to ridiculous lengths to distance themselves from to show their innocence. That is why we are seeing statues being taken down, history books being erased and old white male authors being left off of college reading lists. This is all proof at how innocent the administrators and policy makers are. As Steele points out, White Guilt is more about proving innocence than caring about the oppressed and marginalized. The result of this is race-hustlers taking advantage of guilt-ridden whites who will bend over backwards to show they are not racist.

Steele:

The Exhaustion of American Liberalism

White guilt gave us a mock politics based on the pretense of moral authority.

"White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret."

It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.


Full Article:

The recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and even riots, along with the Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the Trump presidency, exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos. Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.

All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending?

America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.

White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.

White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.

It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.

When America became stigmatized in the ’60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else. Subsequently the American left reconstituted itself as the keeper of America’s moral legitimacy. (Conservatism, focused on freedom and wealth, had little moral clout.) From that followed today’s markers of white guilt—political correctness, identity politics, environmental orthodoxy, the diversity cult and so on.

This was the circumstance in which innocence of America’s bigotries and dissociation from the American past became a currency of hardcore political power. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as opportunities for Americans to document their innocence of the nation’s past. “I had to vote for Obama,” a rock-ribbed Republican said to me. “I couldn’t tell my grandson that I didn’t vote for the first black president.”

For this man liberalism was a moral vaccine that immunized him against stigmatization. For Mr. Obama it was raw political power in the real world, enough to lift him—unknown and untested—into the presidency. But for Mrs. Clinton, liberalism was not enough. The white guilt that lifted Mr. Obama did not carry her into office—even though her opponent was soundly stigmatized as an iconic racist and sexist.

Perhaps the Obama presidency was the culmination of the age of white guilt, so that this guiltiness has entered its denouement. There are so many public moments now in which liberalism’s old weapon of stigmatization shoots blanks— Elizabeth Warren in the Senate reading a 30-year-old letter by Coretta Scott King, hoping to stop Jeff Sessions’s appointment as attorney general. There it was with deadly predictability: a white liberal stealing moral authority from a black heroine in order to stigmatize a white male as racist. When Ms. Warren was finally told to sit, there was real mortification behind her glaring eyes.

This liberalism evolved within a society shamed by its past. But that shame has weakened now. Our new conservative president rolls his eyes when he is called a racist, and we all—liberal and conservative alike—know that he isn’t one. The jig is up. Bigotry exists, but it is far down on the list of problems that minorities now face. I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It’s harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.

This is the reality that made Ms. Warren’s attack on Mr. Sessions so tiresome. And it is what caused so many Democrats at President Trump’s address to Congress to look a little mortified, defiantly proud but dark with doubt. The sight of them was a profound moment in American political history.

Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism is and what it means at home and especially abroad. Instead it remains defined by an America of 1965—an America newly opening itself to its sins, an America of genuine goodwill, yet lacking in self-knowledge.

This liberalism came into being not as an ideology but as an identity. It offered Americans moral esteem against the specter of American shame. This made for a liberalism devoted to the idea of American shamefulness. Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.

Let’s stipulate that, given our history, this liberalism is understandable. But American liberalism never acknowledged that it was about white esteem rather than minority accomplishment. Four thousand shootings in Chicago last year, and the mayor announces that his will be a sanctuary city. This is moral esteem over reality; the self-congratulation of idealism. Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.

 

[Wingslaught]

Yeesh. We're going around in circles here. At some point, there's someone who believes this genuinely, right? Why do you think they do?

Probably because they think white people have it easier than them and it's not fair, damn it!!!

 

[Wingslaught]

I will quote Shelby Steele:

Author Shelby Steele on race relations, equality in America

Shelby Steele: Well, when you think about it black American culture evolved over three and a half centuries. Every minute under which they [Black Americans] lived under oppression and they adapted to dealing with the fact that those freedoms were going to be cut off. They had to somehow make a life within all of those restriction, and they did. Part of the - one of the - I think black American culture is nothing less than heroic. I mean, they evolved - look at the - you know, the contribution like music and so forth. They achieved great things.

...

[White Guilt] keeps feeding whatever blacks are doing is not helping them, thinking of themselves as nothing more than members of a group, of protesting and so forth. It's white guilt that keeps feeding that. What is white guilt? We always - we think - well, I wake up in the morning and you feel guilty about black Americans? No. White guilt doesn't have anything to do with actual feelings of guilt.

White guilt is the terror of being seen as a racist, as a bigot that now pervades American life. All of our social policy, our culture, everything is touched by this anxiety in most of white America. Understandably given America's history that they are vulnerable, they have this vulnerability to being disarmed of moral authority.

...white guilt causes this drive to prove and establish innocence, and so then we have a whole generation of black leaders who do one thing, and one thing only, milk white guilt. And we're at a moment, I thought this protest [Kneeling in the NFL] was telling in that regard, kind of pointed in which culture maybe turning because it was a fruitless protest. It achieved absolutely nothing.

The essence of American liberalism, I think is the - again, the pursuit of innocence. Innocence of specifically the ugly American past. And that is why, because I am free of that ugliness and innocent of it, that is why you should vote for me. That is why you should let me change this aspect of the university system. That is why you should let me do any number of other things, not because I have better ideas, that I am a better problem solver, but because I offer this identity of innocence, which is now the, I think, big political problem that we have not identified up to this point.

Hillary Clinton and her deplorable statement, now famous, as a perfect example of saying, "These people are bigots and racists. I am innocent. You vote for me, you prove your innocence. I offer you an identity of innocence." Being liberal, being left is more an identity than anything else. This is the way I think of myself, as a decent civilized human being and those other people are contemptable, and so it works on a cultural level.

Liberals clearly genuinely think of themselves as "the good guys." It's too bad contempt and Narcissism go together like to peanut butter and jelly though.

 

[TheComebackKid]

Dinesh did a good job of showing that people like Richard Spencer who employ a white nationalist point of view are actually just another form of progressivism and fundamentally at odds with conservative/Trumpism ideology.

 

[Jack V Savage]

Steele's comments are an answer to your question.

Not in the least. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

http://forums.sherdog.com/posts/143030931/

Post 43.

Can you do something like that for people who disagree with you on this issue? What I'm seeing is that you simply do not understand the argument, and thus you cannot have a meaningful view on its correctness. When I ask you to demonstrate an understanding of the argument, you can only frame it in terms of people you disagree with having some kind of character flaw.

Probably because they think white people have it easier than them and it's not fair, damn it!!!

And here's another one. The people who have indoctrinated you guys have practiced a form of mind control. Understand that I'm not saying you must agree with any particular position, but to not even be able to bring yourself to consider the argument advanced by other sides, if even to ultimately reject them, forces you into a kind of child-like state where you're entirely dependent on others for your beliefs. I suspect that underlying this is a fear (either by your programmers or yourself) that your position is wrong (won't stand up to honest scrutiny) and that rejecting it would require a loss of community.

 

[EradiatedHaggis]

That's not the issue we're discussing now. For people who genuinely believe it, what do you think the reason is? What set of facts leads them to that conclusion? I think if you're saying that they're being led astray somewhere, you have to know that.

So you are saying people only believe in something if there are facts that lead to it? So tell me, what set of facts have lead people to believe in an invisible man that lives in the sky who had a son that told people to eat his flesh and drink his blood, died, came back 3 days later and then flew up into heaven...oh, and who told people not to judge or condemn others yet still gives that power to those that collect money on his behalf...cause, God needs money yo!

 

[Possum Jenkins]

Since you guys are talking about it, here's the actual 1988 essay that brought the term "white privilege" into the limelight-

http://www.interpretereducation.org...te-privilege-by-Peggy-McIntosh.compressed.pdf

It's really amazing how the term gets thrown around to mean a million things. The essay is short and the points are extremely clear and simple so there's really no excuse in misrepresenting it.

 

[Wingslaught]

Since you guys are talking about it, here's the actual 1988 essay that brought the term "white privilege" into the limelight-

http://www.interpretereducation.org...te-privilege-by-Peggy-McIntosh.compressed.pdf

It's really amazing how the term gets thrown around to mean a million things. The essay is short and the points are extremely clear and simple so there's really no excuse in misrepresenting it.

Sounds like the main point is that whites and blacks have different experiences in America. It's not some unearned, undeserved privilege granted to whites though. Whites earned the right to be the majority in the country by conquering this land, staving off foreigners and establishing the Republic.

 

[Jack V Savage]

Sounds like the main point is that whites and blacks have different experiences in America. It's not some unearned, undeserved privilege granted to whites though. Whites earned the right to be the majority in the country by conquering this land, staving off foreigners and establishing the Republic.

Really @Devout Pessimist? Wingslaught is a huge (embarrassingly so) fan of Jared Taylor, and his argument here isn't that white privilege doesn't exist but that whites should be privileged. I don't think you can simultaneously be supportive of this kind of ugliness and try to claim the "moral revivalist" mantle.

 

[Joe]

 

[Wingslaught]

Really @Devout Pessimist? Wingslaught is a huge (embarrassingly so) fan of Jared Taylor, and his argument here isn't that white privilege doesn't exist but that whites should be privileged. I don't think you can simultaneously be supportive of this kind of ugliness and try to claim the "moral revivalist" mantle.

My argument is that whites earned the right to be the majority in the country and that they deserve the benefits of being a majority, as slight as those benefits may be as described in the article.