It’s been quite incredible to see the enormous chasm open up between ‘left’ and ‘right’ this year. I’ve seen nice liberal friends of mine declare themselves in the nice comfortable bed of Black Lives Matter, unflinchingly turn their Instagram squares black, make the black power fist, and blast book covers of ‘White Fragility’ and ‘How to be an Antiracist’ across their social media pages. This is in the context of 100 days of rioting in Portland, widespread violence across most major US cities, billions of dollars of damage, much of the economic activity unrecoverable, and more dead people by BLM/Antifa rioter at the point of writing (20) than all black people killed by police officers in 2019 (19).
You almost couldn’t dream up a more perverse state of affairs: what if all people who think of themselves as well-to-do altruists, suddenly, due to some mass collective hysteria, started supporting the wanton destruction of property, the mindless arson, the lootings, the murder. It’s an extravagant Clockwork Orange themed Halloween party with a Star Wars Imperial March soundtrack, held in a swanky liberal half-mansion, that’s been looted and is currently on fire. It’s almost as if social media has driven us to the point where we’ve all made a gentleman’s handshake to start living in caves and flinging our faeces at each other again. Who needs a functioning health care system? I know a really good woke progressive transgender shaman who is able to treat pancreatitis through the power of performantive post-feminist dance. It’s as if some very large threads of the project of Western liberal democracy just appeared and progressives and liberals everywhere just said ‘go on then, might as well,’ wrapped their little pinky finger around it and gave it a big bloody tug, and kept on tugging. The football's been cancelled so let's throw ourselves into this Maoist revolution stuff instead.
The thing most bonkers about this state of affairs is the accusation that because I’m not jumping on the toxic Black Lives Matter bandwagon that I am therefore a card-carrying member of the ‘far-right’, or ‘alt-right,’ umbrella terms which the mainstream media uses routinely to characterise anyone with opinions outside of the social-justice Overton window. “You think burning down family-owned businesses is wrong? Don’t you know those buildings are symbols of oppression? Nazi Scum! Off Our Streets!” "Do you think it’s wrong to shoot people dead for being Trump supports? Nazi!" "You didn’t bend the knee and raise your fist when the mob asked you to? Nazi!" My liberal chums, I'm afraid to tell you that having even the slightest sympathy for these attacks puts you, the leftist, in the company of any upstanding, card-carrying member of the NSDAP in 1930’s Germany.
It’s as though the left decided to dabble in a little bit of fracking in the heartlands of mainstream political discourse, just on a whim – fracking the fertile soils of reason and civility - and when the subsequent cracking of the earth began to show with the first rounds of rioting and statue desecration, tiptoed their way across the fractured land, all the way leftwards - far far far leftwards, and then resumed drilling as the tectonic plates shifted. As more cities were lit ablaze and more business were destroyed, with the prospect of the complete dissolution of the American project insight, the people that'd already moved just about as far to the left of the political heartlands as possible, decided to inject a heavy stream of water into the mantle of the earth, triggering a catastrophic earthquake which separated them entirely from the mass of people they'd previously lived, worked and occasionally even bathed with. The mass of folk they left behind were now so far to the right that they now all resembled Nazis.
My dear liberal friends, you’re so embroiled in this mass delusion, the newly political tribeless such as myself and conservatives are the only groups left defending eccentric ideas such as the rule of law, having a functioning police force, and not burning down property and killing people for their political affiliation. How I long for more halcyon times when being on the left meant joining a march with a homemade sign, going vegan, occupying a building for climate justice, or picketing slaughterhouses for animal rights. Now anything other than liking and sharing “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon,” BLM videos is synonymous with Sieg Heiling.
Usually, I’d have enough confidence in the reasonableness of people to attempt to make their way back to the yawning chasm with now represents ‘the centre’ of political discourse. I’d expect my liberal friends to dust themselves off, knock back a few hangover tablets with some organic sparkling mineral water, and wave goodbye that high horse they’ve been riding on its merry gallop on the dirt path to Hell. Like the ancestors of odd-toed ungulates becoming geographically separated on the Eurasian steppe leading to new species of horsey, we political humans too have diverged onto two geographically isolated islands of information. This barrier, not physical but just as consequential, is so profound that we’re now not even receiving reporting of the other islanders, and when we do it’s so politicised that its only use is to get emotionally riled up, performing some Lord of the Flies-style war dance before planning one’s next midnight raid.
Why did liberals begin destabilising the political centre when we all know liberals hate fracking? Trump derangement syndrome is no doubt partly to blame. But it doesn’t explain the white guilt of liberals who have grown up sheltered in middle-class white liberal neighbourhoods with other white middle-class people who spoke to a black person once in school and who shed a tear watching international cinema. You must be an ally if you shed a tear watching Ttotsi and Hotel Rwanda.
Those of us who grew up poor, in the inner-city, with a diverse and healthy palette of skin tones, don’t fetishise any one shade over any other. Sometimes shades of black and brown are pretty cool, and sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes hues of white and yellow are a great compliment, and at other times they’re not. The point is that, unlike in painting, it’s not the colour which counts – it’s the content of one’s character underneath the pigment.
The shades of a person’s skin is nout but a cloak for the minds and souls that they house; personalities made up of the particular assemblage of talents, charms, quirks and deficiencies, inherited through no free will of their own, and characterised, in all their complexity and nuance, by the term ‘human being’. Those of us, who give priority to one’s spirit not skin, rest comfortably in our colour blindness. We aren’t petrified when we run into a black person on the street and we aren’t deferential to blacks for the sins of whites who lived long time. Black people are not mythological demi-Gods to be feared, revered, respected and hero-worshipped. They’re our equals; people just like us.
My liberal friends, this mass delusion has to stop: it’s time to stick up for the true liberal principles that you ostensibly used to stand for. You’re not racist if you call out bad ideas, and Black Lives Matter the organisation, couldn’t be any more of a terrible idea if it tried to ride a unicycle backwards while blindfolded over a den on hungry lions. Black Lives Matter is an authoritarian, Marxist, narcissistic, vindictive, backwards, regressive, identity-politics-fuelled menace to the fabric of a good, liberal society. They’re the dirty bomb which sends humanity back to the dark ages. It’s time you shake off the feeling of debt you feel through your lack of ever having met someone of a different skin tone, and through your support of acts of violence, have a look at what stares back at you in the mirror: somebody that, like the hyper-liberal student participations of the Stanford experiments, aren’t as benevolent, altruistic and tolerant as you once thought you were.
