The right’s unwillingness to mount a coherent defense against racist anti-white animus encourages the left to keep it up.

One of the most important but least mentioned developments over the last 10 to 12 years has been the growth in respectability of anti-white hate. 

In an era when criticism of various identities has become a firing offense, we might have gone one of two ways. We could have tried to be fair about it and mandated that if blacks, gays, Jews, women, and so forth were to be above reproach, then so would be whites, straights, Christians, men, and so on. This would have made for a dull but genteel and idealistically principled culture.

Instead, the conventional wisdom in America has become that the human race is divided into two kinds of identities: the Good ones (i.e., Democratic-leaning) and the Bad ones (Republican-leaning). If anyone is so rude as to mention any unfortunate facts about American society’s Democratic-designated sacred cows, everybody else must jump in to explain that any and all failings of the Good people must be due to the malignancy of the Bad people.

This is of course childish and stupid. Indeed, Marvel superhero movies offer more sophisticated models of the relationship between the Good Guys and Bad Guys.

Why has racist enmity against whites become so acceptable? There are multiple reasons, but I think the most important driver is that the grand strategy of the Democratic Party has become to exploit the growing diversity of the American electorate to construct a Coalition of the Fringes. The less you demographically resemble George Washington, Ben Franklin, or John Adams, the more likely you are to vote Democratic. Pitting the increasing margins of American society against its core has been reasonably successful for the Democrats: they’ve won a plurality of votes in seven of the last eight presidential elections. 

But you can also see the obvious problem with this ploy: how exactly do you unite black church ladies,
transgenders, Asian immigrants, movie executives, academics, blue-collar Hispanics, gays, and so forth? The only solution Democrats and their affiliates in the press have come up with has been to stoke resentment and animus among Fringe Americans toward Core Americans (whites, men, straights, the married, homeowners, and so forth).

Granted, there’s a ruthless logic to the Democrats’ tactics. But those tactics are also hard to defend ethically.

Importing ringers from abroad to vote for you is bad enough, but then encouraging racist animus toward other Americans to keep your ramshackle alliance from turning on itself is even worse.

But few Americans reflexively think about the ethics of the situation in this way. Not surprisingly, the Democrats and the media relentlessly quote the Emma Lazarus’s “wretched refuse” Statue of Liberty poem, “The New Colossus,” as if it were the Constitution. But what’s especially striking is how few white conservatives call out racist anti-whiteism for what it is.

There is so little interest in responding to the growing anti-white animosity of the Great Awokening decade that nobody seems to know whether to spell the term describing hatred of themselves as “anti-whiteism” or “anti-whitism” on the model of “anti-Semitism,” which drops the “e” at the end of “Semite.” I looked to The New York Times for guidance on spelling, but while it has run 5,770 articles since 1851 featuring the word “anti-Semitism,” it has run none with either “antiwhiteism” or “anti-whiteism,” and just two with “antiwhitism,” the latest being about apartheid South Africa in 1983. 

In case you are wondering whether an anti-white person is an “antiwhiteist,” which would emphasize his being racist or, like an anti-Semite, an “anti-whiteite” (with or without a hyphen), well, don’t ask The New York Times. In its 173 years, it’s never seen fit to print any possible version of the term even once. As George Orwell pointed out in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four’s “The Principles of Newspeak” appendix, it’s hard to notice a reality if you don’t have a word for it.

Instead, conservatives prefer to label anti-white racism “Communism,” “Marxism,” or some other 20th-century “ism” that’s hardly relevant in 2024. 

Republican activist Chris Rufo made progress by adopting the left’s own academic jargon term, “critical race theory.” But why not make your objection self-evident? Hating whites because they are white is wrong.

This lack of coherent pushback against anti-white racism encourages the left to keep it up. Meanwhile, the few rightists who do see what’s going on are driven to desperate, despairing recommendations, such as calling for the breaking up the United States on the assumption that nothing else can prevent genocide.

This is not to say that racist anti-white violence is currently running amok on the streets. Indeed, black-on-white murders peaked way back in 1980, during the powder cocaine boom. Further, there has been a major falloff over the generations in robbery-murders. Mugging pedestrians and knocking over liquor stores have declined as credit cards have replaced cash. 

Granted, the overall gun murder rate is up nearly 50 percent from a decade ago—before the rise of Black Lives Matter at Ferguson in August 2014 got so many blacks killed in black-on-black shootings and car crashes. Most of the carnage induced by the de-policing fad of the Great Awokening, in fact, has been intraracial. Now in the 2020s, a huge fraction of murders take place at black social events. Hence, the historic surge in shootings after George Floyd’s death in May 2020 mostly impacted whites by driving up home prices in the suburbs and small towns.

Encouraged by the growing climate of hate, there has been some increase in “stochastic terrorism” against whites—a phrase that means violence directed against demonized groups. It is especially perpetrated by meth-addled schizophrenics who have helped make public transportation even less popular in this decade than it has been in previous ones. But it wouldn’t be hard to dispatch the 100 or 200 scariest crazymen in each of our big cities to asylums in the peaceful countryside. So this decade’s rise in random violence against white and Asian urbanites is hardly an insoluble problem, just one that we haven’t resolved to do anything effective about yet.

So, do demands for diversity inclusion, and equity spell DIE for whites?

Nah. It’s a philosophy that appeals less to hard men than to overweight women. Nor is the spread of anti-white hate terribly likely to lead to apocalyptic outcomes such as genocide or civil war. 

There are no practical ways to divide up the country when the political dividing lines don’t follow something simple like latitude or longitude, but instead run roughly between the inner and outer suburbs of our top 100 metropolitan areas. 

Instead, I’m referring to the normalization of anti-white racism in media discourse.

Consider, for example, the popularization of the racist and sexist slur “Karen,” a recently invented term of abuse for middle-aged white women, the definition of which The New York Times has patiently explained over and over so that its subscribers can employ it with confidence: Know Your Slur.

Of course, a huge fraction of Times’ subscribers—who tend to be very white and not-so-young—could be described as Karens themselves, but that seldom seems to occur to them.

Now, the Old Gray Lady, which traditionally prides
itself on its gentility, would not enthusiastically jump on a social media bandwagon to stereotype pushy and demanding Jewish women as, say, “Shoshanahs” or demanding and pushy black women as “Imanis.” After all, we live in an age sensitive to microaggressions. But defaming “Karens” is fine because they are white, the designated punching-bag race of 21st-century journalism.

In pre-woke 2011, only one article appeared in the Times featuring the name Karen and the term “white woman” (and that only accidentally referred to a slur that hadn’t been invented yet). By 2020, near the peak of its anti-white rage, the Times ran 28 such articles.

Or consider the jargon term “whiteness.” Google’s informative Ngram database reports that “whiteness” more than quadrupled in use in English language books from the late 1980s to Ngram’s last updating in 2019. While “whiteness” is no doubt still employed in nonracist books about Antarctica, interior decorating trends, and bleach, it’s primarily used these days to explain what one hates about white people and wishes to abolish from the human race. Not that one really wants to “exterminate” whites, which sounds genocidal—just their whiteness. Or something.

While calls to “abolish whiteness” may sound alarmingly Hitlerian, advocates of deconstructing the white race respond that they don’t mean genociding the white race, which they believe science can demonstrate doesn’t even exist biologically. They just want to deconstruct “whiteness,” which is totally different from whites (or as acclaimed Atlantic prose stylist Ta-Nehisi Coates used to write, “people who think they are white”).

In 2022, a widely praised novel, The Last White Man by Pakistani-American Mohsin Hamid, fantasized about a Northern Europe in which the white race suddenly goes extinct by waking up as generic nonwhites. Some white racists riot, but eventually they turn dark, too. In the end, the world, minus its whites (or maybe just without its whiteness—the author is vague on whether their DNA is rewritten), is a better place. 

Hamid’s book was acclaimed by literary critics, excepting The Atlantic’s reviewer, who raged that this genocidal fantasy wasn’t anti-white enough because some of the minor ex-white characters felt wistful about their lost whiteness:

To treat “whiteness” as a thing that can be “lost”—in Hamid’s novel, “mourned”!—distorts the fact that it is not a cultural or ethnic monolith but a shifting, exclusionary ideology that, again, requires violence.

Likewise, in the frenzied summer of 2020 during the Mostly Peaceful Protests, virtually all major outlets followed the Associated Press in suddenly switching the word “black” to uppercase to show their reverence. The Washington Post was the rare institution that chose to also capitalize “white.” Everyone else seemed to feel that the Post’s commitment to racial evenhandedness missed the point of the exercise, which was to designate which race deserved to be capitalized (Blacks) and which deserved to be belittled (whites).

If the Associated Press and the like suddenly changing the rules of capitalization to make clear who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys seems childish, well, it is childish.

And that’s a key point to understanding the development of anti-whiteism. Wokeness is a puerile, lowbrow, greed-driven, racist tantrum. 

If the Associated Press and the like suddenly changing the rules of capitalization to make clear who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys seems childish, well, it is childish.… Wokeness is a puerile, lowbrow, greed-driven, racist tantrum.

Now, many conservatives assume otherwise, believing that their woke opponents must be motivated by profound, although misguided, intellectualization. Hence, they blame the abstruse Frankfurt School of cultural Marxism or 1970s French postmodern theorists like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. At minimum, Harvard elites must be behind it.

That the major theorists of the Great Awokening, such as Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Robin DiAngelo, aren’t really all that bright, and that their theories are popular because their fans in prole academia are even dimmer than them, sounds deplorably racist and sexist even to The Deplorables. The notion that public intellectuals were smarter back in the days when white men like William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal hissed at each other on network television is unthinkable even to white male conservatives. After all, as Dan Quayle explained to the Japanese during the Rodney King riots, diversity, while it may not look like it at the moment, is our strength.

What drives mainstream conservative thought in this century tends to be what drives the leading remaining conservative institution, high school football. Hence, conservatives tend to be terrified that they will say anything racially insensitive that might mess up their high school football team’s chances.

Or consider one of the most fashionable words of this decade: “equity.” From exactly which sophisticated but demoniacal philosophy is that impressive-sounding word borrowed? 

None, actually. When the woke demand equity, what they mean is quite simple: they want to take your home equity. And spend it on themselves.

Is anti-white hate an unstoppable juggernaut? Probably not. 

First, one long-term problem the diversity, inclusion, and equity regime faces is that it’s anti-competence. Central to wokeness is the idea that the new ruling class should be drawn from demographic groups with a weak track record of achievement, because that record is merely proof of their oppression. So they deserve reparations in the form of power. This is a recipe for ineptitude.

Rufo, once again, has figured out a way to dramatize this: because academic DIEversicrats, like former Harvard president Claudine Gay, tend to be relatively lazy, dim, and unethical, many of them have track records of plagiarism that can be exposed.

Second, America’s most pound-for-pound politically potent ethnics, Jews, have been slowly waking up since Oct. 7, 2023, to the fact that, whether or not they (or anti-Semites) consider themselves white, the black ladies in the HR office mark their kids down as white for diversity initiative purposes, and the Office of Management & Budget has their backs.

After affirmative action was invented in 1969, numerous Jewish intellectuals like Nathan Glazer worried that it was just another quota system for not hiring their relatives. But over the subsequent generations, Jews increasingly moved up to the kind of really good jobs in Silicon Valley and Hollywood that weren’t subject to racial preferences, so quotas became less of a concern. But the Great Awokening, such as the 2015 #OscarsSoWhite frenzy, has tended to focus on driving whites out of the most desirable (i.e., most Jewish) jobs. Not surprisingly, this has been disastrous for Jews.

Will Jews come to grasp what has been happening to their upcoming generation during the Black Lives Matter era? They probably won’t if it’s not spelled out for them, so why don’t we make the effort to be clear about how Jews are officially white? Why not explain that anti-white racism is tantamount to anti-Semitism?

And let’s make sure not to let the Biden administration concoct a new Middle Eastern and North African racial category for the national census that might reassure Jews that they can safely engage in what I call “flight from white,” or the disavowal of white identity when it becomes inconvenient.

Third, most nonwhite Americans, outside of elite entities, don’t actually approve of anti-white hate. On the rare occasions when it’s brought to their attention, the nonwhite masses tend to find racism against whites to be distasteful and un-Christian. So, call it out. 

Rufo’s focus on Critical Race Theory works great for giving Fox News-watching conservatives a way to object to anti-white hate without sounding the slightest bit racist. But this idiom is impenetrably obscure to nonwhites who are good candidates to be our allies, people who value competence, such as the Asian coder, the Hispanic contractor, and the black high school-football coach.

The conventional leftist wisdom assumes that the solution to our racial problems must be greater sensitivity to “lived experience.” But the field where the races probably cooperate best in America, football, is run by large men with whistles shouting insensitively at young men. 

Lastly, we should be making fun of the tendency of leftists to hate whites. This pattern of racist hate should be scoffed at, satirized, and scorned. Stereotype the left as what they are: hate-filled racists.

Ronald Reagan rolled to a near-landslide victory in 1980 because a week earlier he had responded to Jimmy Carter’s debate wonkery with, “There you go again.”

Why not do it again?