With all the talk about how awful “hate” is, you’d think it would be out of style by now. Don’t believe the hype. An industry built on the pretense of stamping out hate depends on customers who feel it creeping up from every nook and cranny. Professional hate-o-phobes would be left high and dry in a dearth of spite and malice. That’s why they pay plants to make hateful sounds and promote hate-hoaxers. The business model is well established. The security racket, for example, relies on a desperate sense of insecurity. It’s the same reason some guy like Dale Gribble might infest a dwelling with rodents, termites, or bed bugs. “Intolerance,” as Phyllis McGinley put it, “being, Ma’am, a state no tolerant man can tolerate.” And that’s even truer if his meal ticket depends on it. (RELATED: The Hypocrisy of the ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ Contingent)
We now know what I’ve long proclaimed to be reality: the SPLC and colleagues are scared that there might not be enough hate going around to keep them in fancy threads and plush digs. So, here’s a gratis contribution to maintaining their raison d’etre. There is a lengthy list of things worth hating that are enjoying neglect of that sometimes healthy emotion. Here are a few to start the litany. (RELATED: Eventually, the Grift Does Get Exposed)
Their hate for your guts is legitimized by lofty principles; any reciprocal emotion is proof of what a degenerate you are.
Once upon a time, kids like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn could get away with hating school. Boys their age who liked sitting at a desk, polishing apples, and being the teacher’s pet were called sissies. We have since learned that Twain’s tweens suffered from a toxic affliction known as “masculinity.” Twenty-first-century school marmery has been engineered to fix that wagon. They’d begin by dosing those two kids silly. A life jacket would be forced on Huck, and justifiable homicide couldn’t be ruled out over his vocabulary. Tom, meanwhile, couldn’t get anywhere near Becky Thatcher without a chaperone, a consent form, a condom, and abortion pills.
Since the 1960s, the “non-conformists” have taken on a new pedagogical religion. The cure is worse than the disease, and conformity has been turned up with a vengeance. “School” has been reformed, and the 3 “R’s” rule no more. In our enlightened day, as touch with “feelings” prevails, hookey cannot be granted quarter. Now any young’un with a normally functioning stomach must tolerate nausea from about 8 AM to 3 PM. And they wonder what drives suicide numbers up.
Children were not the only prey conformity-obsessed non-conformists stalked. Where, they mused, were parents most vulnerable? Wildlife videos switched on the light bulb, the watering hole! Enlightenment struck in the boardroom, and employees of listed corporations were herded into the intellectual gulag. The meetings must go on until morale improves! No dismality of the daily grind was as dreaded as a suited-up windbag at the pulpit. GI’s weren’t let off that hook either. General officers dropped combat proficiency down the list of priorities. As they plunged deeper and deeper into the role of scolding nag, recruitment plummeted. A 50 grand signing bonus became necessary to bribe rank and file into enduring bromidal indoctrination.
The Who turned out to be wrong; the new boss was not the same as the old one. Employees were suddenly expected to be as productive as ever in a hair-trigger-sensitivity minefield. The merch should roll off the line on pace while the slogging class gets fluent in Newspeak by yesterday, or else!
If you ever wondered how those six, seven, and eight-figure executive salaries are earned, this Starbucks narrative provided an instant classic. After a non-paying loiterer was told not to use the bathroom, a common policy in most Asian restaurants, the wunderkind in Seattle brainstormed obsessively. Eureka! Kids with tattoos and brass dangling from their nostrils would lead Joe Six-Pack out of the desert. Who else was fully qualified to lecture your common, pedestrian American about race relations? A cup of Joe should come with a sermon from somebody who can’t wait to get back to Mom’s basement, where the bong is! Meanwhile, the “half-caf, half decaf” nuisances that Steve Martin lampooned decades ago graduated, now it’s “a half decaf, half re-caf, double soy-boy chai latte with a dash of kombucha.” And the SPLC crowd can’t understand what’s to hate about any of them.
While we are never given access to the minutes of conclaves where the brass of media, ruling circles, pedagogues, and CEOs convene, the diktats laid upon us are pellucid and unsubtle. What the process of seizing your rights, buying power, and culture requires, above all else, is redundancy. The Ivory Tower, from whence all beneficence flows, must have sought inspiration from Archy, the world’s most renowned cockroach: “If you make people think they are thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”
If there’s one big thing the grandiose enlightenment can’t stand, it’s being hated. Through some abstruse calculation of advanced anti-racist math, mind-numbing repetition places “love” after the = sign. How else did the expression “diversity is our strength” gather traction? It’s not necessarily impossible to wring some sense out of the idea, but un-expounded upon and unchallenged, it’s an ideological bludgeon.
Then there is “do the work.” That one spews out the maw of guilt-grifters who prize consumption and loathe production. “Check your privilege” is the demand from people living in 3,000-square-foot homes across from Central Park to those checking for deals at Walmart. “Safe space” is where you go to think about ways to avoid realizing how phony it all is.
Redundancy, unfortunately, has spread far beyond the parameters of mere wokesterism. “Diversity” has strengthened us to a point that would make de Tocqueville take it all back. He saw none of the class-conscious bowing and scraping, in these United States, common to the Europe of his day. Third-world cultures are not unknown to bring sycophancy with them. Dictators, satraps, gendarmes, and apparatchiks always put the beloved people in their place. Flattery and deference are necessary to dodge the unpleasant sides of management in the “developing world.” Flooding into service industries en masse, immigrants bring such ways with them. In the developed world, native populations often have to go along to get along. It’s a saccharine, cringy revelation on human nature to find enormous numbers of Americans suddenly keen on being slobbered over. Our president is the most salient example.
The meetings on high floors at Wall and Broad, or elsewhere, the righteous discuss the loathsomeness of their clientele, can never get around their caste obsession. Statistically, no working-class minority group has moved up an inch through corporate concern over its welfare. The classes on the verge of thriving have certainly been brought down, though. Hence, it is mathematically provable that so-called “stakeholder capitalism,” whatever its supposed promise, is a road leading to serfdom. William the Conqueror might look in awe at the lands and properties presently amassed by our feudal lords.
But the suits don’t “hate” you, they’re about what’s in your best interest. And, after generous contributions, the SPLC agrees. In all their concerns about poverty, the Southern Poverty Law Center never seemed to notice Wall Street’s cut of the GDP pie rising by 50 percent since 1980. Their job is to make liquidity and financial transactions more efficient. When their cut while producing nothing material goes up, somebody in the equation ends up with less; it’s not the SPLC. Entertaining any hostile emotions about them and the motives of their benefactors, out loud, could surely place you on a list of those they love least.
When I was a kid, too young to stay up late, firstborns of the boom often repeated a line from a movie that was on TV past little ones’ bedtime: “How dare you look like someone I hate.” We pre-teens never knew what it meant, but the line did have a lovely ring to it. Hate isn’t some archaic element of human nature that eggheads can outsmart. It’s exactly what enlightened ones try to evoke, describing something they pretend to despise. Their hate for your guts is legitimized by lofty principles; any reciprocal emotion is proof of what a degenerate you are.
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