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The Important Thing to Remember About Sarah Jeong
Sarah Jeong has written a lot of hateful, bigoted, racist things. She has a deep-seated animus toward white people in general and white men in particular. “[T]he world could get by just fine with zero white ppl,” she has written. “Let’s fund a study on whether killing all the white people would make black people safer,” she has suggested. “”Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins,” she said. There are literally hundreds of similar statements. The New York Times looked over this woman’s body of work and decided that “this is exactly the kind of person we need on our editorial board.”
The important thing to remember, though, is that neither Sarah Jeong nor the Editorial Board of the New York Times represents the majority of Americans. Outside of the boardrooms and faculty lounges, most Americans are not obsessed with race, do not hate other people based on race, and just want to get along with one another.
There are only two kinds of racist bigots in the United States. The “bad kind” are found at the outer margins of society, are economically disadvantaged, socially isolated, and have no power. The “good kind” work in elite media and academic circles, and are granted platforms to broadcast their hatred. If you simply change the choice of racial slurs, their rhetoric is interchangeable.
Published in Culture
A small minority who is vocal and make all the changes. The Majority of Russians were not Bolsheviks.
This is the real irony. I’ve also argued before that the vanishingly small number of people racist against traditional minority groups is not a threat. The first reason is that, out of a country of 320 million, the estimated number of such people is in the low thousands, and the second reason is that, as you pointed out, these people are not a force in society. However, the anti-white racism that we see now from the powerful institutions controlled by the left (media, education, etc.) could have the effect of exasperating people who are not racist and actually pushing them in that direction. I have to admit in my own case, my largely positive view toward Asians has taken a bit of a hit.
When we brought our youngest son home from Haiti we were attempting to homestead in a very rural, very white part of upstate New York. Parmesan cheese was pronounced “Par-Meeez-eee-an. That white. The commonest reaction to this beautiful, deeply brown young boy was a broad smile and a sheepish question: “Can I touch his hair?” I did notice one racial custom: Every guy we encountered gave our son from Haiti a high five and almost always waved hello to his brothers.
In some sick minds, I guess that’s racist.
This is my fear. After being told repeatedly that one is racist, and having no defense from the accusation (academia has taught that there isn’t one), the human impulse to just give up and embrace it is going to hold some appeal. Or, more likely you become very defensive or fearful when you’re around non-white people. And the whole thing ends up a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I will believe you when the NYT gets treated like the daily stormer.
I wonder if Ms. Jeong sees any irony at all in her secret wish for a group demise and her obvious desire to “succeed” in the context of that same group’s making – a western society?
This reminds me of when a lot of black ladies were so thrilled that a mixed-race person recently married into the British royal family. Yes it affirmed human equality and acceptance (by one side anyway) of differences that were obstacles in the past. But why celebrate belonging to something if you really look down on it? Why was it such an “achievement” to have a representative accepted if you don’t secretly admit that the acceptance was into an institution within a culture that you aspire to belong to – and if that is true, what good would it do to bring it down? Does Ms. Jeong think that taking over and maintaining a forefront society by “others” would wipe out the truth that they may have added to it, but did NOT invent it ? Are they prepared to lie to their descendants and hope the truth will never be uncovered?
So, if you want to contribute, you have to admit admiration and undertake some emulation…which is normally and openly rewarded with recognition as a current contributor. Dwelling on cultural flaws in this civilization is what nobody needs her for, as we have self-correction traditions long underway without her, and expressed by far less childish analysts. She’s just taking the easy road rather than attempting to chronical all that is wrong from the inside of the darker and more dangerous realms of the world. Those who join in the context of success will inherit belonging. She will remain the outsider she identifies herself to be.
I really want to believe this. But increasingly I’m unsure. Certainly most Bernie voters would probably support Jeong. Probably most Hillary voters. That’s 60 million people … that’s a lot of people. The important thing to remember is that Jeong provides a window into how Lefties actually converse with one another in their natural habitat. She isn’t some one-off. She feels free to speak that way on Twitter because everybody she knows speaks the same way. It’s common. It’s normal.
As the words “scandal-ridden” should always precede the words “Obama administration,” so should the words “openly racist” always be used in conjunction with the words “New York Times.”
Jeong reminds me of this snippet of video in which a masked Antifa white male is berated by Latina Antifa member for being white. “It’s still your fault. You’re inherently racist. It’s in your DNA”.
If he wants to show that he really is “an ally“ he should “go punch a Nazi”
On the Left, this is the new normal:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3i6J2fcrKi8
Man that’s discouraging that the NYT, once known as America’s paper of record, would hire such a person. Unforkenbelievable! Has the paper gone completely, not just partly, mad?
Sad.
She also seems to be getting the Trayvon Martin treatment as well, i.e., disingenuous photos being used. Most photos accompanying stories are of her in long, black hair. My understanding is that the pictures of her in short, pink hair and glasses is more current. Who would believe that beautiful woman is a racist, but the SJW look makes it possible.
There are good and bad people in every race. (Mostly bad, but whatever.) FWIW, I’m posting something later that is most definitely pro-Asian.
Exactly.
This is not to say that every person who accepts and subscribes to her Intersectional beliefs is or starts out as hateful as Sarah Jeong, but the logical progression and unbounded nature of the ideology makes those who choose not to reject it more like her as time goes on. And of course some choose the belief system purely due to their emotional pathologies to begin with.
And ‘conservatives’ who choose to publish articles in the NYT after this should, at the very least, be made to justify why they choose to grant respectability to an openly racist newspaper.
The whole reason we are where we are, as a culture, is because of “woke” leftists one-upping each other in the virtue signaling wars.
“I support equality for women.”
“Well, I support equality for women and blame white men for inequality.”
“Well, I support tearing down the patriarchy.”
“Well, I support tearing down the patriarchy and making males subservient.”
“Well, *I* support tearing down the patriarchy and castrating all the white men.”
And so it goes.
Sarah Jeong learned her anti-white bigotry from elite white people. I seriously doubt that her Korean parents raised her that way.
There was a similar problem with a Mexican guy I knew. He was anti-American but his anti-Americanism was purely American. It was what the left was selling when I went to college.
Exactly. And nicely put.
If we’re going to talk about what identity politics has done for race relations — all bad — I think it only fair to talk about the damage done by the Obama presidency to white/black relations. And not just because of the race baiting.
I simply assume every black I meet since Obama is an ideological foe, because they voted for him 90+ percent. Twice! When your racial group is so wholly owned by one party no matter how corrupting and destructive that party is to the country and even to your own racial group, I can’t help but believe it. Intellectually, I know it’s not true(!), but it’s a reflexive response based on voting data. It’s a damned shame blacks who are not leftists are put in the position of having to explain themselves to everyone on both sides. I’m hopeful the #walkaway movement will balance this out now that the Left has gone bat guano bonkers.
I would think that Jeong’s tweets, including those against Times columnists Thomas Friedman, David Brooks and Paul Krugman, is going to take away a great deal of the paper’s ability to have much clout, at least in the near-term, when they get outrageously outraged about what someone on the conservative side of the aisle has said or tweeted, and haughtily call for them to resign or be fired.
As long as they stand by her, they’ve set her tweets as the parameters of what is acceptable comment for maintaining a high-profile job, and if they claim otherwise, they’re simply going to keep getting called on the double-standard.
The DNC and the NYT (if Rush is right, the media is in charge of the DNC) thinks that due to the Left’s dominance of the major social media platforms, K-12 and higher education and the civil service at all levels of government Trump won’t be able to undo enough stuff to matter when the Dems regain power over in 2024. A major obstacle is that they see blacks and Latinos starting to peel off of the Democrat Party, so they intend to foment racial division and violence. They remember the success of BLM and want to expand that to make sure that they have enough dead and living voters to ensure the that Undead Hillary or whatever Prog they run wins.
That’s certainly the case, and it explains the vitriol in 2015-16 in the attacks on both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and before that the attacks in the 2008-12 period on Sarah Palin, because the Democrats see all the various special interest groups as theirs, and freak out more at the idea that the Republicans might elect a Latino or a female president first — had Cruz or Rubio been elected in 2016, as hard as it is tot believe, the anger on the left towards them by now would be just as great and borderline psychotic as it is with Trump, because they’d would be working as hard as they could to write Cruz and Rubio out of their race.
(Their anger at Trump is in part because he taunts them in a way no other president would have, and the fact they were 1,000 percent sure if they helped game the GOP primary system by giving Trump 24/7/365 coverage during the primaries with minimal critical comment, Hillary would be a shoo-in as president on 11/8/16. The smartest people in the room outsmarted themselves, and Trump’s ongoing tweaks make them mad enough to think there’s nothing wrong with things like Sarah Jeong’s blanket condemnation of white people.)
They already thought that. They’re escalating their Big Lie operation on other fronts as well:
Kramer may be willing to give the Times the benefit of the doubt and call it “fake news.” I’m not.
We who think so should verbalize more often that this is the intended progressive goal. In the past it was the klan. Now it’s Antifa. In either time, this is true: the left in this country feeds on racial and class hatred and strong group identity.
They race bait the way they do because they want people who are not, in their hearts, racist to become racist out of fear and defensiveness.
If you ever want to fall completely down a rabbit hole for a few hours, start watching YouTube videos of Jordan Peterson. Before you know it, 3 or 4 hours of your life have gone by, and you’ve done nothing else.
Anyhoo, in one of the videos of his that I watched a while back, he made the (of course) erudite point that on the political “right” there’s an ideologically extreme contingent who promotes a politics of racial superiority — including neo-Nazi militia groups & the like. I used the quotes around “right” because I just personally have trouble accepting that such beliefs can be aligned in any meaningful way w/ classical conservative/libertarian thinking. But, alas, like it or not, such idiots are unfortunately lumped in w/ the political right, and often designated the “alt-right,” or some such thing.
Peterson makes the point, though, that such racial superiority politics are also universally rejected by the prominent thought leaders & politicians of the right — e.g., the kind of folks at The WSJ editorial page, National Review, The Weekly Standard, etc. 99+% of the political right wants no association w/ such people.
But conversely, there appears to be no such line that can be crossed on the political left. There appears to be nothing that anyone on the radical left can say that makes everyone else on the left cut ties w/ him or her. In fact, the more radical folks on the left are drawing everyone else towards their radicalism, thereby making the radical into mainstream leftist ideology.
It was only about ten years ago that a Democrat politician could be openly pro-life, often, for example, because one’s politics of looking out for the little guy was very much a product of one’s deep Catholic Christian faith. But now there’s no room for anyone like that. Barack Obama ran for President in 2008 while claiming ambivalence (at best) on the issue of same-sex marriage — recall him claiming layer that his stance on the issue had “evolved.” Ten years later, it’s inconceivable that any Democrat in the national limelight could claim anything but full-throated support for same-sex marriage.
And someone like Sarah Jeong can get hired by the New York Freakin’ Times.
I too had those uncharitable thoughts, mainly during Obama’s second term. I would think, “you have responsibility for the deterioration of the country. Thanks for your vote.”
One other thing to point out: from time to time, I read on blogs written by ex- alphabet agency types that around 70% of all members of the KKK and other White Supremacist groups are FBI. Are those who’ re infiltrating the KKK there to stir up trouble, or to report to the government if some master plan for major violence is revealed and then the government agencies should be able to get such a report? Who knows? But in any event, the fact that there is surveillance going on is a clear indication that there might be a gradual withering away of such groups if they weren’t being infiltrated!
This is so, so, so, so very true. Until he became the Republican nominee, DJT was the darling of the media. Then it became time to destroy him.
An irony for many, including me, is that until he became the Republican nominee, DJT was anathema to me, as I expected he would turn out to be a stalking-horse for the Undead Hilliary. Then at or around the time of the Repub national convention, I heard him call for her prosecution for collusion with the Ruskies or some such and realized he was serious. While I would have voted for him despite my misgivings (“Anyone but Hilliary”), I have been unabashedly and unashamedly on his side ever since.
It’s the delicious frisson one feels when you’re avant-garde, fighting the revanchist forces. Every advance in human history has been opposed by sullen, suspicious forces that represent the old order – therefore, you’re part of the same historical movement to liberate humanity. The more radical you are, the more you grasp the essence of what needs to be done.
I don’t ascribe this to some grand plan hatched in universities and spread through the sleeper cells – it’s a variety of unfortunate elements coinciding. The curious discontent of prolonged prosperity makes some people mulish and impatient for perfection, and that makes them magnify a society’s deficiencies. The collapse of cultural confidence among the elites means they cease to see our society’s virtues as unique and precious, but just myths that paper over our innumerable sins. A generation steeped in identity politics thinks a non-hierarchical aggregation of tribal interests (with some animals more equal than others) is a superior mode of societal organization than E Pluribus Unum, because old dead white men amirite?
The adolescent boomer rage against Mom and Dad turned into a narcissistic, ahistorical rejection of their own heritage, and when the culture went Reagan it alienated them even more. They found a certain return to tradition with Bill Clinton, but Bush the Second unmoored them.
I read a piece from some flibberdigibbet lefty about the need to nationalize MoviePass and provide free movie tickets for everyone, and she concluded thus:
“Let all good things come to an end. Replace them with something better.”
That’s their creed. That’s how they feel about the good things. Imagine how they feel about the things they don’t like.
The folks on the Left really truly want to have all the good things made perfect, and made perfect right now, dammit! Unless it involves them having to do something real. Like their experiencing an increase in their taxes. Or a degradation in their lives, such as the public school where their kids happen to go, suddenly having teachers from south of the border who speak negligible English and pidgin Spanish. Then all of sudden their ideals are “woke” and they too #walkaway.
I don’t think this is true. The folks on the Left want to be in control, to be in charge, to have things their way. “Perfect” and “good” have naught to do with it, except to the extent that these terms define the state of their getting their wishes.