Imagine you’re an ethnically “white” editor at The New York Times. How would you feel about sitting in the same room with Sarah Jeong, the newly hired editorial writer with a history of virulently anti-white tweets? More importantly, how would you feel whenever you wanted to comment on a work product that you think she could improve?
Here’s a person who hates your entire being, just for existing, entirely based on race. What would you think before critiquing someone’s work, when you know that the other person works with you, sits with you, and hates you to the core?
https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1025440080545148928
One cannot possibly imagine how superficially polite but internally toxic and Stasi-esque the environment of a New York Times editorial meeting is, unless of course, you accept that all the men and women who work at The New York Times are groveling, self-hating cowards. It would be a great social science experiment to take an anonymous survey of the New York Times office to unearth what people really feel about their co-workers.
They Don’t Think They Need to Apologize
Jeong’s vacuous apology, and The New York Times’ defense, for her vicious tweets would make Jacques Derrida sound like Aesop’s fables, it was so twisted and meaningless. It wasn’t even an apology, more like a justification for her tweets. This, coming from someone whose parents fled a country where more than 30,000 Americans died to save some from totalitarian tyranny.
For someone who grew up in an affluent American city, went to Harvard University, and obtained a job at the country’s paper of record before 30, the amount of victimhood she expresses is incomprehensible. The life Jeong has, refugees fleeing North Korea would give up an arm to get.
However, it is not difficult to understand. It is actually very simple. Jeong’s tweets are not stupid. It is not just a performative art by an affluent, urban, middle-class imbecile, a way of signaling in-group communication to people of similar economic and ideological bent.
Jeong didn’t tweet she hates “white people” because she wanted to be accepted among a certain section of society, where rhetoric like this is a common way of bonding. She channelized a very common idea among certain university circles. A scroll through post-colonial, feminist and gender research, and other “activist” departments will show exactly the same sentiments, in more jargon fueled writing. Claire Lehman, the editor of Quillette, has called it neo-Marxism.
When American Sociological Association President Eduardo Bonilla-Silva bizarrely advocates “equality of outcome” and writes that “to fight color-blind racism…blacks and their allies would be the core of a new civil rights movement demanding equality of results,” one should know the education system of the West is broken beyond repair, and due to a handful of disciplines. Jeong didn’t just appear in a vacuum.
How Marxism Evolved Into Race Hatred
To understand how people like Jeong happen or thrive, one needs to understand how much Marxism has evolved. The Left’s character has changed over the years. The American and British right-wing mostly still focus on Stalinists and Trotskyists, threats that have receded over the years to a minimum.
Stalinism, or centralized communism in one country, is a failed concept, and in the long run, poses no threat to anyone. It is also incomprehensible that a majority of westerners would give up their iPhones and live in communes, and anyone suggesting that sets himself up for electoral failure. Even China has moved away from the autarkic economic system that was the backbone of the Soviet economy. Venezuela is bankrupt.
On the other hand, Trotskyists, the intellectual forefathers of any globalist utopianism, are also on the backfoot, simply because they are too incoherent and divided. There was a joke in Kolkata, where I grew up under stagnating and conspiratorial communist one-party rule during the eighties, that if one puts ten Trots in a room, there will be 11 communist factions, and one standing outside, calling the police.
That doesn’t mean these ideologies are not dangerous, it simply means that they are incapable of launching a proper challenge to the economic realities of capitalism, which has been proven with time to be simply the flawed but most workable system to run a country.
The biggest threats are Gramscians and neo-Marxists, who cannot be identified because they are like chameleons. Put simply, these are the people who will pretend to be conservatives or liberals to gain entry, then censor voices, marginalize dissent, and hijack any institution towards a leftist future. In the 1970s, German communist Rudi Dutschke termed it as a “Long march through the institutions,” where one subverts the professions from within.
‘Heightening the Contradictions of Society’
Every critical theory traces its roots to Euro-Marxism. To give a more modern example, two feminist professors wrote a paper telling feminists to spread as a “virus” to disrupt all other academic fields and institutions, with an aim to corrupt and destroy the gatekeepers of society from within, to “infect, unsettle, and disrupt traditional and entrenched fields.” Academia is a prime example where, in a certain section, activists are constantly churned out, who then go on to work in media and other channels of communication.
Equality of opportunity is discarded in favor of similarity, and the focus is almost always on identity. These are the same people who start interdisciplinary self-referential journals, claim to be experts in every field and go on television and radio to promote arbitrary pronouns and transgenderism, and act as commissars at university departments, disinviting and deplatforming any idea they perceive as antagonistic.
The end goal is always “accelerationist” or, in Vladimir Lenin’s theory, “heightening the contradictions” of society, to pave the way for violence and revolution. Jeong herself might not want to kill all men, despite her rhetoric, although it is increasingly difficult to separate the performance with the words. Nevertheless, she is a useful idiot working towards the goal of social destruction.
Consider the scenario. You have two different individuals, promoting two worldviews. On one hand, you have an open socialist like New York candidate for Congress Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who talks about taxing almost to the level of Sweden, pure and complete redistribution, nationalization of every single industry, and a possible Red future.
On the other hand, you have someone who claims to be a liberal or a conservative. But in reality, this person supports the exact same policies as Ocasio-Cortez, plus open borders in all but name, trans politics, lax law and order, and utopian internationalist foreign policies based on arbitrary and cherry-picked notions of human rights. The first one will be laughed at, rightfully so. The second one, however, will be difficult to even trace, much less tackle, until it is too late.
That’s because they will, in Mao Zedong’s description, be wearing a different jersey during the game. To understand where Jeong came from, look to the activist departments within Western universities, which teach what Jeong preaches. Unless we deal with such ideological propaganda centers, the core of the Western society will be slowly hollowed out.
