Why I despise SJWs

Social Justice Warriors make my teeth itch.

On Sunday the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards got political (Surprise! Surprise!) and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss evidently sang a song about how nice it would be to have a president “who is not beloved by Nazis.”

Last week ESPN anchor Jemele Hill tweeted, “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.”

Author Sarah Jaffe responded to Miami Police Department warnings against looting in the wake of Hurricane Irma with a tweet, “good morning, the carceral state exists to protect private property and is inseparable from white supremacy”

Carceral state? Meaning we lock people up who break into homes and steal stuff? Oh whatever will this poor old world be FORCED to endure next?

Someone named Daniell Rider found a decoration at Hobby Lobby which included some cotton plants so offensive she took to Facebook to express her outrage.

“This decor is WRONG on SO many levels. There is nothing decorative about raw cotton… A commodity which was gained at the expense of African-American slaves.”

This would be humorous but evidently she got tens of thousands of “likes” and even more comments pro and con.

Because of a cotton plant. Let that soak in.

This is but a recent sample of the mischief SJWs have gotten up to in the past few weeks. Over the last few years we’ve seen them make life miserable for science fiction fans, gamers, and hobbyists of all kinds.

Look, we get it. Nazis are bad. Racists are bad. Slavery was just awful. Thank you. We’d never have known that if you hadn’t told us.

But wait a minute. The Third Reich was destroyed in 1945, it’s most prominent leaders were hanged or imprisoned.

Slavery was abolished in 1865 when congress passed the 13th Amendment.

Racism persisted for a long time afterwards and still exists though much diminished. But we have come a long way from the days of Jim Crow. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde about war, racism is not just considered wrong – it’s vulgar.

And here it gets complicated. Discrimination in hiring, employment, public accommodations etc, is illegal. Get caught doing it, and you could be in serious legal trouble. Just being accused of it can involve you in expensive litigation not to mention social opprobrium.

But inequalities persist that can’t be explained by the remnant racism in this country. There is a good argument that the cultural legacy of slavery and Jim Crow play some part in persistent poverty and high crime rates. Culture is powerful.

There is also a good argument that well-meaning attempts by government to help have had negative effects on family stability resulting in generational poverty.

And if you make the case for those claims SJWs will call you a racist and say YOU’RE the problem.

If you’re white, they’ll call you a White Supremacist. If you’re black, they’ll call you an Uncle Tom.

In the most recent absurdity, TV personality Chelsea Handler called Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson a “black white supremacist.”

I disagree with SJWs. I think they’re wrong and I think they’re living in a fantasy world in which Nazis and Klansmen are still as powerful as they were almost a century ago rather than the tiny minority of pitifully neurotic attention-seekers they are.

But that’s not why I feel this overwhelming contempt for them.

Nazism was destroyed at a terrible cost by a generation of men and women we rightly revere.

Slavery was destroyed in a war that killed more Americans than all our other wars combined.

Jim Crow was defeated by the patient courage of generations of Americans who risked their lives and reputations to stand up for what was right.

What price do SJWs pay for their conspicuous advocacy of causes won before they were born?

There is honor to be had in the mopping up operation for sure. But what risks do they run? What hardships do they endure? What justifies their arrogant assertions of their courage and moral superiority?

They believe themselves to be the equal of mighty ancestors but show themselves to be only posturing phonies.

This column appears in the collection “The View From Flyover Country: A Rural Columnist Looks at Life in the 21st Century” available at Amazon.

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