For a long time, Bull Connor was the symbol of southern racism, because he famously used fire hoses and dogs on civil rights agitators in Birmingham Alabama. Like most white people in the 60’s, he opposed the idea of racial integration, but it was his way of doing it that got him labeled as the ultimate racist. It was one thing to believe that integration was a terrible idea. It was another to take pleasure in a hatred of blacks for no other reason than their race. Hatred, even of that which should be hated, always has an ugliness to it.

Today, the ugly face of racial hatred is directed at whites and worn by social justice warriors, claiming to be fighting white supremacy. In reality they are just anti-white bigots who compete with one another over how much they hate white people. One difference between the anti-white bigots of today and guys like Bull Connor is he was happy to live his life in obscurity. He never set out to be a famous racist. Today’s social justice warriors see racial hatred as a path to fame and glory. It is the easy way into the high culture.

An example of this is Brandeis associate professor Dorothy Kim. She is someone passing herself off as a medievalist. In reality, she is a white-hating bigot and a social justice warrior, who lives to harass white people. Her current crusade is an attack on Rachel Fulton Brown, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago. Kim’s reason for attacking Dr. Brown is that she is a conservative white woman, who does real scholarship, rather than agitate for nutty causes. Kim thinks she can get ahead by hating the white woman.

Rachel Fulton Brown is a serious scholar who has written award winning books on arcane medieval topics. She has written this book and this book. Even if you are a fan of medieval European history, these are esoteric subjects, but that is how the stock of knowledge is developed and expanded. Dorothy Kim is a ridiculous person who writes nonsense like this. The only people talking about white supremacy are liars and lunatics. It does not matter which applies here, either should be disqualifying for an academic in civil society.

Dorothy Kim is not just focusing her attention on Rachel Brown. Kim is an all-purpose white-hater who whores herself out to the daffy girls of Progressive media, hired to popularize academic racism. Not content with attacking white people in real-time, the social justice warriors are now determined to rewrite history to make Henry VIII into soul brother number one. In that Daily Beast post, Mx. Kim goes out of her way to fall for the Cheddar Man hoax, suggesting she is dumber than her sparse work product suggests.

That is just the thing about the people like Mx. Kim. They are not just content to publicly attack white people for being white. There is a suicidal nihilism to the modern racist. Their project is as much about decreasing the stock of human knowledge as it is chasing white people from the white societies that welcomed them. What is offensive about Mx. Kim is not that she does not know things, it is that she knows wrong things and demands that the rest of us, as a matter of social justice, accept falsehoods as fact, fiction as truth.

That is another thing you see with the social justice warriors. They seek to replace accomplishment with moral fanaticism. Rachel Brown has reached her status by a long career of being good at her specialty. Mx. Kim is just not bright enough or willing to do the work, so she is attacking white people, in order to establish her bona fides as a culture warrior. Everything about Mx. Kim’s career to this point is a claim that she is a victim, by virtue of her DNA, and therefore must get free stuff from white people or else racism.

That is why these people are so vicious. Being a virtue signaling loon is a highly competitive racket. There is always someone out there preparing a nuttier claim than the nuttiest claim of the moment. Because the ideology of the social justice warrior is completely empty, a pure negative ideology, the result is a version of the mob screaming “Goldstein” in 1984. It is not enough to hate white people. What matters is that you are seen hating whitey and doing so with an enthusiasm that is without rival.

That is the ugliness that Mx. Kim shares with classic racists like Bull Connor from half a century ago. It was not that he opposed integration that made him ugly. It was that he was willing to abandon decency and order in his opposition to it. The willingness to sacrifice everything for a principle is fanaticism and it is just as much an enemy of civil society as the barbarian. That is what you see with people like Mx. Kim. She is a fanatic, ready to burn it all down in the name of social justice. There is nothing uglier than a fanatic.

Addendum: A commenter asked how people like Mx. Kim gets into the academy. The reason the social justice warrior has success is that Progressives are always fighting themselves. By that, I mean they are always at war with that which they fear about themselves or that which they are currently doing. The Left’s rage against Russian meddling corresponds with their own collaboration with Russian oligarchs in an effort to rig recent elections. Google the phrase “Opposite Rule of Liberalism.”

In the case of the academy, the people hooting about racism and white supremacy are relying on the innate racism of the modern academy. “Oh look! We have an Asian applicant in medieval European studies!” The white liberals in the field are so desperate for multicultural status points, they fall all over themselves to find and embrace non-whites, purely on racial grounds. They embrace anti-racism, because they hate their own racism, and the result is more of the self-loathing that drives the Progressive.

Multiculturalism has created a vast market for dull-witted grifters like Mx. Kim. She gets the attention that women naturally crave, but she gets to make a career out of it, thus making herself both a hero of feminism and multiculturalism. Her choice was working in a cubicle somewhere as a clerk or going into the promising world of social justice. it is not hard to see why she chose to be an SJW. It is also easy to see why she is so bitter and nasty. At some level, she knows she is a fraud, and she hates herself even more.