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The “Useful Idiots” Abusive Relationship
With the release of Michael Walsh’s new book, I have been thinking about his last one, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, and his discussion of critical theory. During an exchange with a (nice) leftie in that cesspool known as Twitter, it finally hit me what is going on between the leftie leaders and their “useful idiots.”
It is similar to the relationship between abusive husbands and their spouses. The abusive husband demeans the wife and lowers her self-esteem to keep her from leaving, to force certain behaviors, and to boost his own self-esteem. She feels she is unworthy of better. The lefties use critical theory to abuse their flock for the same reasons.
They make people feel guilty for their success, blaming racism or privilege, and demand they atone by embracing certain cleansing ideas or behaviors. Nothing is spared. They are are told they are intolerant if they are religious. They are responsible for gun deaths if they own gunsor support the 2nd. They are terrorists if they join the NRA. They are to be ashamed of their patriotism because of the country’s presumed sinful past. They are damaging the planet if they don’t support the global warming agenda.
The leftie never seems to care if the agenda item actually achieves the desired result because it is all about his own atonement. If he dares stray, he is severely punished, just like the battered wife. Why do the “useful idiots” stay in the abusive relationship? Why does the wife return to the abusive spouse?
Back to the leftie. She supports open borders because to oppose that is racist. She thinks poor people are poor because of rich people, whose money must be redistributed out of fairness, and because of privilege. She has accepted that she must be a racist if she, a city dweller, fears large black males when she is alone.
She is that battered spouse.
Published in General
A plausible angle that I have not considered before. I will have to think about this.
Having just read Shelby Steele’s great book White Guilt, this certainly has some resonance. It is a bit of a different angle. He talks about a sort of bargain that white liberals took up where they could “dissociate” themselves from the sins of America’s past by adopting these positions and regaining their sense of moral authority. The focus then has always been that sense of redemption without regard for whether the policies or views actually help anybody. Perhaps the leftie leaders are the ones doling out the “abuse” as you put it and making that grand bargain that Steele was describing. The abused spouses are the poor followers who take them seriously and are cowed by the SJWs.
I would highly recommend reading White Guilt. It was written over 10 years ago but is more relevant now than then.
Uncle Joe taught them well.
http://www.solasisters.com/2009/12/lesson-of-plucked-chicken.html
This is, of course, only one version of the story. Here’s a different version:
http://occoffeestop.com/Stalin_and_the_Chicken.html
This has always been my understanding as well, that it is a relationship of dominance and submission.
Or she might simply have a rational fear.
The Talk: Nonblack Version
by John Derbyshire
Almost certainly some social psychologists have looked into this and I image they find it dead right whether by mob intimidation. the technique the left uses when they don’t have complete power, or outright direct abuse when they have power. When Lord Acton said absolute power corrupts absolutely he was addressing the absolute corruption of the people around an absolute leader. I love Misthiocracy’s chicken stories at #2, both probably apocryphal, but true. I’ve seen it played out not with chickens but with a gaggle of sycophants.
Thank you. I had forgotten about that book. I really want to know why the lefties take such abusive treatment, the act of eating their own. It is definitely obvious in their use of “Uncle Tom” to attack conservative blacks who leave the plantation, too.
Perhaps health care was the grain in our case.
I remember the fuss made when he published that. If we can’t identify a problem, we can’t fix it. I wonder if his percentages have changed since he wrote that. It was a world I didn’t see while I was in the military and lived in mixed neighborhoods populated with military families and young professional couples. We did have the Leave it to Beaver lifestyle. I don’t get racial hatred and what it gains for people who share a common culture.
Watching this topic in Minnesota has been incredibly eye-opening. 100% vagueness and hysterics. No Democrat anywhere can discuss anything about gun policy intelligently. I don’t care if it’s their specialty in the Minnesota Legislature. It’s unbelievable. We have two hysterical and stupid gun grabber groups in Minnesota and they just look stupid in their press releases and at formal media events. Bloomberg never spends a penny to improve any of this. He has spent $1.3 million over the last two elections simply on electioneering. I think he bagged two candidates, tops.
The other fun one is estate taxes. Just ask them why do you have to take extra of the Walton family’s legally acquired assets when they pass? Every answer amounts to, “because we should.”
They are poor because we practice statist Keynesianism, which is Democrat central planning. They think more Democrat central planning and theft is the solution.
I received an email from a friend of mine who lives in New Jersey. The two of us have never met face to face. We have been email buddies for around 11 years. We both belonged to Democratically-run blogs. (Although nothing about those blogs was “democratic.)
For years we have shared the highs and lows of our lives. We have commiserated with the problems with our grown kids. The problems with society, and neighbors, also the heat, the cold, the floods in her case, the wildfires in mine. We both were ousted, rudely, from the blogs we were on. But we remained friends. Only she is a “progressive” these days.
She let me know that I should just open my mind and my heart to the truth that because the white people in the US and Great Britain have so savaged the world that many evil things were done across the sands of time. Then I must additionally understand that any atonement for all these evil things will only occur if I realize I have no right to my “white privilege.” When I countered with “It sounds like you think my giving up my rights will allow others to be equal, but I see that doing so will only let others have their privilege over me,” she repeated the historical offenses. Everything from the Spanish Inquisition via the Conquistadors in the Southwest USA and Central and So America, to slavery, to Wounded Knee, to Jim Crow laws now up to Trump’s upholding immigration laws. She ended the spiel with her statement that if I won’t see the light, I am a racist.
The friendship is ending. Since I never have been a Conquistador, or a plantation owner, or a guy charging with the calvary led by Custer through the Native American villages, ripping apart bodies of Indian women and children, since I was born after the Jim Crow laws were renounced, I don’t see what a white person giving up their own Civil rights has to do with any of it.
I do know one difference between us – she lives in New Jersey and the privilege losses she might realize in order to accept rampant immigration might not come about for her.
New Jersey, at least the area she is in, doesn’t have much immigration. She will be 81 on her next birthday. Any changes that would affect her would be likely to not come until she is pushing up daisies. I live in Calif and have already witnessed how the big corporations go hand in hand with immigration. Once masses of people move into a state, the unions and the Big Health Care companies soon allow only the semi-literate to hold positions in the schools and the nursing homes and hospitals. I can try to tell her this – but I think to her it would be simply a racist rant. When in fact it is a reality.
I mourn for our dying friendship.
My belief is that if a common culture allows for enough jobs or a sense of purpose, then people are able to assimilate with one another. Assimilate is probably a bad choice of words – relate to one another, maybe?
I had several quite racist family members when I was growing up on the far south side of Chicago. Both women ended up in jobs where they had daily contact with co workers who were African American. Overnight, yes almost overnight, they shifted from the deeply held view of the “other” as lazy, stupid, selfish and uncaring. Had political correctness been in place then as it is now, they wouldn’t have had those jobs long enough to make the change. Their attitude would have branded them as racist and they would have been dismissed from their jobs before daily interactions with others could do its magic.
All of this stuff is settled with force, initially. The planet is not a Mises-ian utopia. I got that from Rush Limbaugh. Also, it’s really stupid to look at our government as a 100% benevolent force like say Charlie Kirk would spew out. It’s complicated.
I do think that there is some truth to the concept of epigenetics where are you inherit trauma from your ancestors. Supposedly they have prove this in Holocaust survivors. I’m not sure what exactly should be done about it.
Peter Kirsanow was on Tucker Carlson last night. This is absolutely must watch. He is an expert on civil rights. All the Democratic Party is doing is electioneering. They have no specific demands about race. It’s only four minutes.
On the Democratic Party does is central plan to fix the central planning that has already screwed up, or they are electioneering and handing out graft. 100%.
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Lucky you don’t work for National Review, or you’d be out of a job now.
Was Kirsanow the man explaining about how the Affirmative Action program inside the air traffic controllers’ union has turned things upside down? And that those with the worst indications via test scores and other means of judging job applicants’ most likely future job performance are more likely to be hired than people who have shown intelligence and an actual aptitude for the types of situations the air traffic control folks must deal with.
I think the whole show might deserve my re-watching it.
It was a different segment.