RUSH: Here’s Victor Davis Hanson. This is really an excellent piece. The title of his piece, “The Game of Pseudo-Authenticity.”
One of the things his column focuses on is this whole idea of white privilege, white supremacy, white this, white that. One of the points he makes is that it is amazing — it is really amazing — how hard the Democrats have worked to lie about who they are, that they are completely fake. They all… Think Kennedys, think Pelosi, think Tom Steyer. The Democrat Party is the modern-day home of obscene wealth in this country. People don’t know this because of age-old image-making that has portrayed Republicans and CEOs as big, rich, uncaring, mean-spirited racist bigots.
But everybody thinks the Republicans are the party of the rich and the party of tax cuts for the rich. But the home of modern uber-wealth in America today is the Democrat Party. One of the points here is that every damned one of them, every damn one — from Warren Buffett to Bill Gates, all of these uber-wealthy people and how they got there. They all have gained tremendous benefits and power and advantage by virtue of them and their families’ participation in the American dream.
It is their participation in the American dream, it is their belief in the American dream, it is their immersing themselves in capitalism that has resulted in them having more wealth than anybody dreams possible. And, yet, instead of celebrating it, instead of attempting to inspire others to follow in their footsteps, they lie about it. They lie about who they are. They lie about what they believe. They lie about their economic policies and philosophies. They want everybody to think that they are hardened, socialist leftists.
Whatever they are, they are not rich Republicans. Whatever they are, they are not rich conservatives. But they epitomize fraud. They epitomize fakery. Look at family of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her “family’s story is one of higher education, upward mobility, and integration into the majority population (somewhat similar to Kamala Harris’s upbringing in Berkeley and Montreal, the daughter of a cancer research scientist, and a Stanford economics professor).” That’s Kamala Harris. But no one ever lies about being more white.
They all lie about being more anything else. If whites are so privileged, why would you abandon it? If there is such a thing as white privilege, why would you do everything you can to run away from it? If all the privilege in America — if all advantages, if all opportunities — are reserved for white people, why would you want to be seen as running as far away from it as you can? Well, because the answer is, whites are not overall more privileged in America than anybody else is. It’s another lie. It’s another series of fakery.
It’s another bit of political construction to insulate these people from being criticized for their acquisition of wealth, being criticized for their acquisition of power, while they engage in that conservatism of others and accuse white people of having engaged in some sort of illegal, nefarious practices; taking avenge of the unfairness that white people have in America. When in fact they’ve done it all! Many of them are white! They run away from it. Where is this white privilege? If it is so dominant, if it’s the way to go — if white privilege is what it takes to get where you want to go, earn the money you want to earn, whatever — why abandon it?
Victor Davis Hanson: If white privilege is a real thing, why is no one trying to claim ethnic whiteness in order access those enormous privileges? Now, you might think the question answers itself, but I still think that it is a good question because white privilege is BS. It’s another hokum-pokum construction of the left that does not exist in reality. Don’t tell your average college student, however.
You know what worries me? Have you seen the latest? We talked about this, the Bird Box, the movie, and now people putting blindfolds on themselves running around. Do you realize how much stupidity there is among American youth today? Some of you people that are not yet retirement age had better be very worried that there aren’t gonna be enough young people living long enough to provide your benefits, the way they’re killing themselves engaging in the stupidity they’re engaging in.
What is that one thing we heard, tampon something or tampon fires or tampon swallowing or something or tampon juice? Remember that? Condom snorting? Yeah, there’s condom snorting and then there’s Tide Pods and what people are doing with those. These people are absolutely lunatics! Imitating walking around blindfolded. Anyway, if white privilege is a real thing, why is no one trying to claim it? Why does nobody want to be it?
It’s kind of a turnaround on Yogi Berra’s old saw: “You know what? That restaurant, it’s so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.” Yeah, white privilege. It’s such an unfair advantage that nobody wants to use it. Instead, what do we have? We have a bunch of very successful white people trying to lie and claim more degrees of blackness. Look at what was the name Rachel Dolezal and then we got Fauxcahontas, “I’m an Indian! I’m one 1/1024 Indian!”
We have all kinds of white people doing everything they can to claim they’ve got some degree of blackness, some degree of Native Americanness, some degree of Hispanicness. Or we have rich people claiming to be poor. “How odd that our establishment insists that being ‘white’ is synonymous with unearned ‘white privilege,’ while millions of whites in job and college applications for decades have been trying to con fake minority-identities and while upscale minorities have no desire—even when intermarried, assimilated, and integrated into the majority culture—of emphasizing the partial white ancestry.”
You notice that? Obama is half white. He doesn’t want any part of that whiteness. No way. White privilege? Why not? If there is so much white privilege, if there is so much white opportunity, if all of the power resides in white America, then why not emphasize a part of you that is white and claim it and be part of that club?
Instead, we’ve got these lunatics like Elizabeth Warren and Rachel Dolezal and all the rest of them trying to claim that they are one smidgen of this Hispanic or one smidgen of this African-American. I know you think the question answers itself, and it may. This is an all-out assault on the white majority because the white majority is blamed as being the lineage of the founders of this country and of course the foundation of this country is unjust and immoral and unacceptable and must be overturned.
“Minority identity has become a brand for the upper middle class in the manner of a luxury car. One strives to drive a Mercedes or Jaguar not because it is more reliable or even all that much more drivable than a Toyota or Honda, but because it signals a particular cachet.” It says something about you. “And so too wealthy suburbanites often find emphasizing non-white identities useful even if it means occasionally constructing them.”
Remember when adopting a black African child was the new accessory for Hollywood starlets? And that’s what it was. It was an ancestry for the uber-guilty left. It was the most recent way of wearing the red ribbon that said you cared about something when nobody else did. And the more ribbons you wore, the bigger your heart was, and the fewer ribbons you wore, the more hate you had. Everything is symbolism.
“In other words, in almost every case of cultural or racial appropriation, the effort is largely one of a progressive seeking to be more even authentically progressive by identifying more genuinely with perceived victims of majority biases and discrimination.”
You have all this white privilege, they say, you have all these advantages, and yet white leftists run away from it, and they join organizations to try to ridicule it. And yet they have used every ounce of that privilege to amass fortunes and power, like Elizabeth Warren, the names go on and on.
So you have a game here of pseudo-authenticity. And it just epitomizes the Democrats’ push for everybody to believe and act as though this is a country of new minorities, new demographics. That nobody wants to be part of this white privilege because it’s so evil, so inherently unfair, unjust, immoral, mean-spirited. And it’s just more unreality, more inauthenticity.
So what’s real, what’s decent, what’s good gets laughed at, ripped, criticized, and it makes people afraid, certain people afraid to be who they are. So they attempt to tell people they’re not that and they’re something else. Before you know it, nobody is real.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Adam in Raleigh, North Carolina. Great to have you, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Rush, deplorable Tar Heel state dittos.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I’m trying to figure out what this white privilege stuff is. My kids come home and they tell me that they’ve been taught in school about it. But I’ve never been really familiar with what that concept is. You see, we’ve always looked at folks based on their character or in a business setting or sports setting as production, they play a lot of sports. So I’m trying to figure out what that means. And it was very interesting. My senior young man is trying to apply to college, and we’ve been told recently in the last month by both representatives of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his high school counselor, they’ve said literally these words: “Oh, you’re a white male from white county, don’t even apply. You don’t have a chance.” And I commented to one of the counselors, “Wait a minute. If he was not white and from a different county, then does that change things?” And they said, “Well, it’d be a lot better chance, you’d have a lot better chance and better results.” So, you know, I’m not for discrimination in any stretch or any sense in any way. But, boy, I tell you what, it certainly feels like —
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you white?
CALLER: Well, here’s the thing. My kids are Polish and Irish so they’re screwed from the jump.
RUSH: No. No. So you are white?
CALLER: I am.
RUSH: And your wife is white, therefore your kids are white.
CALLER: From what I understand, yes.
RUSH: Well, okay. The point being that you are naturally discriminating against everybody when you get up in the morning and start breathing. Well, you keep breathing. I mean, you’re discriminating by living. You are white. You are benefiting from white privilege. You are inherently racist and bigoted because you’re white. What are they teaching your kids that white privilege is?
CALLER: Well, you know, some of the same kinds of concepts about like how white folks have kind of dominated society and there’s also the whole gender thing as well where there’s not a meritocracy. It’s essentially, you know, if you’re a man, you have put down women your whole life or you’ve left other people behind, and they do that with the race thing too. And in our house, we have folks of all — I mean, there’s a boy that’s a DREAMer that’s one of my kids’ best friends, Mexican kid, and, you know, I clothe and house him. And we just don’t operate like that. So I don’t get it.
RUSH: Well, you see, forcing you — this is the way this has always worked. Forcing you to say one of my kid’s best friends is Hispanic, I can’t possibly be racist. By accepting the premise that you’re racist, you start trying to defend it. Which is the whole game. It used to be you accuse some white guy of being a racist and he, “No, no, no, no. One of my best friends is black.” “A-ha! So you acknowledge.”
The whole point of this is to tear down the societal and cultural history of America and label it as discriminatory, racist, and bigoted, in order to infect young minds like your kid’s to justify this penalty, to justify penalizing white people on the basis — even though you haven’t discriminated against anybody, it doesn’t matter because you’re white, and this country, as a white country, has been mean-spirited and extremist.
So you are gonna pay the price since you didn’t do anything to stop it in the past. You accepted all the white privilege and all the benefits you have of being white, and you didn’t try, you didn’t step up and blame yourself. So now they’re gonna blame you themselves, and you are put on the defensive immediately. It’s all about, as I’m sure you know, affecting the minds of young people and infusing them with a rising tide of guilt that will cause them then to agree with anything.
It’s the same tactic used with climate change. They blame you for causing it, but they give you a chance at redemption. If you vote Democrat and vote for higher taxes and agree to a more powerful government, if you’ll sign up with getting rid of fossil fuels, then you can make amends for all that you have done to destroy the planet. And so the same thinking and the same strategy is being employed to basically make white people give up — not give up, but not fight what is happening here.
And the Democrat Party, starting in November of 2011, made the decision to cast aside as one of their primary voter groups white, working-class Americans in exchange for creating this massive party that is the sum total of every victim group and minority group that they can manufacture in the country. That’s what’s going on. So that’s why I asked you what they’re telling your kids white privilege is.
But the reason this came up today, Victor Davis Hanson has a brilliant piece on this. We’ll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com. If white privilege is how all of these people became so powerful and so wealthy, why is everybody running away from it? I just explained it to you. If white privilege is where the action is, why is everybody running away from ig? All of these white uber-wealthy people from Bill Gates to the Kennedys to Pelosi, folks, the Democrat Party is the home of uber-wealth, not just rich people, but obscenely wealthy people.
Every damned one of them is lying to people about how they did it! They’re acting guilty for it. They don’t want you to realize how they did it, how they got there. They are basically just puking all over the American economic system that enabled them to acquire this massive wealth and power and whatever. So the whole premise therefore is flawed. It makes no sense. There can’t be any white privilege if nobody wants to exercise it.