A Working Class Perspective on the Internet/Campus ‘Social Justice Warrior’ Movement

1. When college liberals, suburbanite offspring who still live with their parents, and Trustifarian ‘California Anarchists’ complain about ‘privilege’, these complaints often apply more to themselves than to common people.

This is what psychologists refer to as ‘projection’.  When the most privileged students in the most idealized and insulated universities in the country complain about ‘privilege’, it appears to the working class as if those people are hypocritically complaining about themselves, and yet putting the burden of enacting change onto others, many of whom are ill-equipped to enact any kind of meaningful, mass-scale social change.  Long story short, if you are angry about class or racial privilege: start a charity, do community service, but ‘raising awareness’ by haranguing Joe Six-Packs on relatively proletarian internet forums, not only does that do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING positive for your cause, it actually discredits your cause politically, in the minds of many, and pushes those who would otherwise be supporters away.

What I have found is that, deprived of the ability to meaningfully go after the Koch brothers, SJWs will take out all of their rage on a more accessible, working-class person who looks like or shares traits in common with the Koch brothers.  Psychologists refer to this as ‘transference’.  It’s also called ‘hitting the easy target, because the people you are really angry with live in gated communities with armed guards’.  Even if someone is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, unless he has billions of dollars, and is directly responsible for administrating systemic oppression, prejudice, and exploitation, you have no right to hold him accountable for all of that, as if he is ‘one of them’, by way of affiliation or even common opinion, especially if he is in the same (or lower!) socio-economic class as yourself.

Also, it should be noted that, in a lot of ways, the rose-colored glasses of liberalism are a class privilege.  In other words, a charmed life leads to an idealist’s outlook.  Cloistered white girls tweeting about non-racism from the suburbs will be seem silly to urban people, whose rose-colored glasses were smashed by the bullies of the ghetto, long ago.  A playboy millionaire celebrity claiming to be a feminist, and admonishing unknown, working class-males for ‘not being feminist enough’, on the Ellen Degenres show?  Easy for him to say, especially if he has three prostitutes waiting for him in his dressing room, or is happily married to a fellow attractive celebrity.  It’s a lot like feeling morally superior to the poor, simply for being able to afford ‘health’ food, and ‘environmentally friendly’ or ‘ethically manufactured’ products.

Finally, it seems to me that people who were raised by well-off liberal parents, who spoiled their kids, do not seem to understand that a person raised by conservatives, with their lassiez-faire ‘Tough Love’ parenting philosophies, may in fact be less privileged, even if their parents are wealthy.  Liberals tend to assume that all families intra-share their wealth, just because theirs did.  But that’s not actually how all families work, so it’s very unfair to assume that someone is a ‘wealthy conservative’, just because their parents happen to be.

2.  Democrats think that popular people being shitty to unpopular people qualifies as ‘social justice’.

Picture this scenario: a man tries to pick up a woman, and she slaps him in the face.  Is that progress?  No!  It’s the same thing that has been happening for many generations.  It’s a status quo of people in different social classes mistreating eachother.  There’s nothing progressive about that. And yet bad social manners and the mishandling of awkward situations happen constantly, not just in one-on-one situations, but in outsider versus the group situations, all the time, especially in liberal communities such as Occupy protests, anarchist communes, Burner gatherings, and radical subreddits.

That’s the average Democrat’s twisted sense of ‘social justice’: bandwagoning, communal co-dependence, ridiculing the underdog, and trampling the rights of the statistical minority.  It’s basically a more pretentious form of gang warfare.  ‘You are wrong, because look at all of these people on MY side.  And we have collectively decided to ban you.’  I’m sorry, but it’s fucking juvenile to treat people this way just because they think differently than you, or because they refuse to pander to popular misconceptions.  The extremes to which this abuse of social capital and insensitivity towards the socially poor are taken has gotten ridiculous, otherwise, I wouldn’t even mention it.  But it truly has gotten ridiculously petty.  Postmodern liberals have repeatedly proven that social capitalists can be just as ruthless as financial capitalists.

Social maturity, on the other hand, is to respect their perspective enough to reconcile it with your own, and perhaps even realize that you are just as blind to their perspective as they are to yours, both of you are probably right in one way and wrong in another, etc…  You don’t have to respect someone’s opinion to respect their perspective.  Real progress is people from different walks of life understanding and being compassionate to eachother, even when interests conflict.  Social conflict is inevitable and commonplace, even in ‘the best of all possible worlds’.  What is remarkable is conflict resolution via real consensus, which often entails mitigation of the concerns of both sides.

3.  Liberals are just as bad about stereotyping people as conservatives are, they just have different heuristics for doing so.

Some liberals think that all white males are inherently over-privileged.  Some conservatives think that all black males are inherently criminals.  Both of these stereotypes are wrong, and it is unfair to assume those kinds of things of anyone without a very clear understanding of their individual background.

What’s even worse is when people stereotypically bundle someone with causes that are commonly associated to eachother.  ‘Oh, you’re Christian, so you must be a Republican capitalist, right?’  Not necessarily.  Then there are the binary thinkers: ‘You’re not a Democrat, so you must be a Republican.’  Apparently the ‘enlightenment’ required to be a social liberal does not make one immune to committing common logical fallacies.

Finally, the worst is guilt-by-association and straw men.  ‘You have contributed material to an MRA forum, so you must be a psycho like Elliot Rodger.’  Or, ‘You identify as Christian, so you must believe the world is 6000 years old.’  What I see constantly is liberals holding non-liberals accountable to the most extreme conservative positions, even if that particular non-liberal happens to be a moderate or a centrist.  All of these kinds of assumptions represent a willful ignorance to the many shades of grey and nuances between polarized mainstream political positions.  But the sad truth is, that politics have become so polarized in this country, the center looks extreme to both sides.

4.  The SJW misinformation echo chamber is real.

There is plenty of misinformation that goes around on the right: Climate change denial, Biblical literalism, denial of privilege gap between economic classes, etc…

But there is also plenty of misinformation that will not die on the LEFT: All-natural, homeopathic medicine, the misapplication of new age spirituality/Eastern religion, and just the other day I had a conversation with a rather intelligent, well-informed person in which he said, ‘This 23% gender wage-gap needs to be solved…’  If you think that’s a valid statistic, I urge you to watch this:

People read this shit on Tumblr or hear it on Rachel Maddow, and they don’t question it.  They just move on with their life operating under a faulty assumption, thinking anyone who disagrees is ‘ignorant’, because they haven’t read and blindly believed the same biased media source that they themselves have.  Noam Chomsky wrote a book called ‘Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media‘.  It’s all about how commonly propagated media manipulates public opinion, not through force, but through persuasion and selective censorship.  Everyone should read this, and bloody THINK ABOUT IT!

What’s worse is when this kind of misinformation goes around socially, not about general politics, but about individual people in the community.  ‘So and so, whom neither of us really knows all that well, is a junkie/rat/slut/sexist/racist, etc…’ goes around the grapevine in liberal communities, is often accepted as fact because the source has a higher degree of social capital than the target, and it OFTEN isn’t even true, or is some biased person’s subjective take on a half-truth.

If the person being discussed REALLY has a problem, and that problem is VERIFIABLE, then it should be addressed openly, but starting behind-the-back rumors like that is often a cheap social tactic to alienate the target, because the person saying that is insecure about the potential threat this person poses tot heir social position in the group.  In other words, ‘Don’t buy his cookies, he’s a sexist.  Buy my equal-opportunity cookies instead.’  This isn’t liberalism, it’s a marketing tactic, designed to appeal to those of certain biases. So when you hear someone say: ‘That person has a problem, let’s help them’, that’s a real liberal, but when you hear someone say, ‘That person has a problem, let’s ban them’, you should realize that you are being manipulated by someone who is trying to boost their own social status by stepping on easy targets.

How are you going to assume that you are right about national politics when you allow others to manipulate you into misunderstanding the people in your own local community?  Which brings me to my next point:

5.  SJW communities are mismanaged by naive idealists who, out of misguided principles, frequently trust the wrong people, and the wrong information.

I’m coming from a town full of confirmation-biased liberals who only believe what they want to hear, or what suits their ideology or personal interest.  There are many local liberal communities who will automatically extend ‘sympathy privilege’ to a traditionally oppressed person or class, without regard to that person’s individual merit.  ‘That rock and roll singer ALWAYS gets to have a microphone.  Today, let’s give a microphone to this random transgender person.’

But does that transgender person have the ability to be compelling and entertaining?  Maybe the reason the singer always has a microphone isn’t because he is white or male, but because he is good at singing.  Maybe if the transgender were good at singing, they would be given a microphone more often.  And never rule out the possibility that, in addition to being transgender, that person could also be a lying, manipulative psychopath, who shouldn’t be given any social influence.  Just because they align with one of your pet causes, does not make them infallible as a person.

Also, they could TOTALLY be merely playing to your biases.  Maybe they aren’t what they claim to be, but they are simply imitating that, because they noticed your bleeding heart has a soft spot for that particular cause.  The most obvious case of this is the insincere male feminist.  How many foxes will liberal communities let into the hen house, just because they pretend to fit your idea of what a good person should be, they towed the party line, or they played the victim card?

6.  SJWs seem to progressively keep moving further and further away from the ideal that two wrongs don’t make a right.

This is where ideas like ‘White Man’s Burden’, ‘Affirmative Action’, and ‘Charging Men More‘ (as if men don’t already pay for more stuff, anyway) come from.  Gandhi, a real liberal, once said ‘An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind’.  Unfortunately, most liberals are nowhere near as enlightened as Gandhi, in the exact same way that Christians are ‘so unlike their Christ’.

7.  Some of these liberal special interests certainly seem to be rationalizing their own selfishness via ‘revolutionary’ politics.

If you believe that you have a right to lie, cheat, and steal by way of ‘revolution’, then you are no different from the privileged class who consider it their inherent right to lie, cheat, and steal, via ‘the system’.  Why do white people get robbed by black people?  Because some black people have come to ideologically believe that whites ‘owe them’ for injustices that their great grandparents committed against black people.  So the question is: Who has the greater ‘sense of entitlement’?  The jailor, or the recently released prisoner?

8.  Hypersensitivity over slips of the tongue and ‘micro-aggressions’ makes SJWs look weak and insecure compared to people who have actually been through some real shit.

There is a class of humans living on this Earth who lead tough lives.  We live in the ghetto, we went through a war, we were beat up every day in Junior high, we have been incarcerated, we have experienced long periods of poverty, we have experienced long periods of social alienation, we were abandoned by our families at a younger age than many people, we worked very hard for very little money most of our lives, and yet through all this, we endured.

Then, there are a class of people who get hysterically offended because of a suggestive song on the radio, a violent movie playing in theatres, foul language on television, or something someone said to them, in passing.

Which of these do you think is the more privileged class?  Do you find it ironic that the more-privileged class is calling the less-privileged class ‘over-privileged’, or should this gaslighting be recognized as dangerously misinformative?

9.  Redefining legal concepts such as ‘violence’ to incriminate more people only serves to feed the growing prison-industrial complex, while simultaneously making you look like the ‘Boy who Cried Wolf’, thus undermining legitimate claims of violence.

Recently, a transgender person posted on a mutual friends’ Facebook wall: ‘Using the wrong pronouns to refer to a transgender is an act of violence.’  No, I’m sorry it isn’t.  It might hurt you emotionally, as if someone has not considered your feelings.  It may make you feel frustrated with the ignorance or social negligence of another person.  But it isn’t violence any more than someone cutting you off in traffic with no signal, in fact, it’s less violent than that, because there are no rolling, three-ton steel death-traps involved in a verbal altercation.

And no verbal altercation should be criminal in an emotionally open society that values free speech and social cohesion.  The reality is that we are moving towards a society where it is illegal to be angry, and this has only made people angrier.  Political correctness and emotional repression come at the cost of society, and the only people who benefit are courts and jails.  It’s another example of unrealistic idealism having very real negative consequences, consequences which ultimately make the affected society less ideal.

10.  Abandonment of ‘all-inclusive’ principles has created a class of liberal elitists who tend to be self-cloistered group-thinkers with a strong sense of ‘false consensus’.

False consensus is often the result of banning dissenters.  In-group/out-group social politics will have you believing the lies of those with whom you are familiar, and mistrusting the truth of those you don’t know. Until your whole community is merely a group of liars who believe eachother’s lies, and reject the perspective of any outsider who is immune to all the groupthink.  Often it only takes one liar to be trusted in order to brainwash an entire community, and a small contingent of coordinated liars are even more dangerous to the credibility of truth.  And the worst part is, these communities tend to trust people based on hypocritical stereotypes such as ‘women never lie’, or even ‘people who cater to my ego by agreeing with my opinions surely wouldn’t lie’.

Gullible fools believe lies because they trust eachother. Those who are the most heavily invested in lies are the angriest when a dissenter tries to speak the truth.  Malevolent shepherds call dissenters ‘paranoid lunatics’ because these social demagogues are insecure about the source of their own social power.

11.  A non-SJW’s bigotry is assumed to be a result of his privilege, while an SJW’s bigotry is assumed to be a result of lack of empowerment.

If I’m not afraid to go anywhere in the city, and you consider some places ‘scary’… Guess what? No matter what kinds of controversial opinions I have expressed, YOU’RE THE BIGOT.  If you are afraid to ride the city bus because you are afraid of rape or robbery, that is bigotry. If you are afraid to go into biker bars because of all the weird heavy metal people there, that is bigotry.

Of course, there are people who will say that I am only unafraid because of ‘white male privilege’. This completely ignores three facts: 1. I have been robbed by random black people in the ghetto. 2. I have been harassed and brutalized by the police. 3. I am just as susceptible to rape as any woman.

So to assume that this whole system is set up to protect me, and that I, with my supposed imperialist military guard, are the reason everyone else is scared, that is stereotypical bigotry.

Take responsibility for your fear, realize it is irrational, and don’t be afraid to go anywhere, no matter what kinds of bad experiences you have had in the past with ‘those kind of people’. That is open-mindedness.  Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is that it’s a shame to let your own prejudice keep you from doing something that you might like if you gave it a chance. There is a firm line between prejudice and simple lack of interest, though.

Conversely, Dylan Roof was probably not an ‘over-privileged white male racist’.  More than likely, Dylan Roof had a very poor education, dysfunctional family, and few meaningful friendships.  So maybe it wasn’t ‘white privilege’ that drove Dylan Roof to his hateful opinions and actions, but intellectual and social malnourishment.