I have a friend, who is a typical moonbat in that he repeats all the current opinions in The Hive, but insists he reasoned his way to these positions. On more than a few occasions I have pointed out to him that his “reasoned opinion” is identical to what is in the lefty media, often word for word. The result is silence as members of a cult just filter out anything that contradicts the faith.
This is a common feature of mass movements. The people inside don’t think of themselves as members of cult. They think the opinions and beliefs they adopted from the movement were arrived out by reason. They don’t notice that their opinions are identical to their coreligionists. They just think the people who think like them are smart like them. This insider/outsider mentality is a feature of every cult.
You see this in the Cult’s never ending fear of The Backlash™ that has become a staple of modern news stories. After 9/11, all of the moonbats were wringing their hands, fearing that the sight of the Trade Center in rubble would cause those evil white men in the provinces to go bonkers and attack innocent Muslims, who just want to live in peace because Islam is the religion of peace. After all, nothing is worse than The Backlash™.
This obsession with The Backlash™ was on display with Clock Boy in Texas. The narrative says Texas is the epicenter of evil white men so they must really hate Muslims. If The Backlash™ is going to appear anywhere, it will be Texas, or maybe South Carolina, when they are not busy hanging negroes. That’s why the Cult was so easy for Clock Boy’s old man to troll. He grew up around fanatics. He knows how they tick, pun intended.
The frustrating thing about The Backlash™, from the point of view of the Cult, is that there is no such thing as The Backlash™. It’s imaginary. That’s why it fails to show up and do its thing as all the prophesies predict. The solution is to simply fake it so the faithful will not lose faith and there is no better place to do it than the college campus.
The American college campus is a land of make believe where every sort of lefty lunacy is celebrated and indulged. Professors who are not sufficiently enthusiastic for the latest fads are hounded mercilessly. Those who are not of the One True Faith keep their heads down and avoid notice, fearing the lunatics in the same way people avoid the Religious Police in Saudi Arabia.
That’s why the list of college hoaxes is so long. You have the highest density of fanatics, absolutely convinced The Backlash™is going to appear at any moment, so it is conjured.
A coalition of interest groups wants the U.S. Department of Education to require colleges to monitor social media and protect students from threatening and offensive comments.
The request was made last week by 72 women’s and civil rights groups, who claimed that harassment and threats on anonymous apps like Yik Yak are an emerging Title IX issue, according to Inside Higher Ed. “Students on college campuses throughout the country have with increasing frequency used anonymous social media applications, such as Yik Yak, to target women students, students of color, and sexual minorities with harassment, threats, and other forms of intimidation with impunity,” the coalition said in a press release. “Earlier this year, students at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), for example, were threatened through Yik Yak with rape and murder after they spoke out against rape culture.”
The groups complain that the typical response to such incidents by university administrators has been “to disclaim responsibility for harassment and threats that occur on that platform” because the site is anonymous and accessible without using university servers.
In the UMW case, Feminists United on Campus (FUC) and Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF), both members of the coalition requesting federal intervention, filed a Title IX suit against the school, charging administrators with a “systemic failure to protect students from a sexually hostile school environment, from sex-based cyber assaults, and from threats of physical and sexual violence.”
The pattern is always the same. The lunatics make a nuisance of themselves and then say they are the victim of The Backlash™, claiming death threats or now, rape threats. In this case we have two imaginary bogeymen, The Rape Culture™ and The Backlash™. The Social Justice League is real, but it’s enemies are not as there is no such thing as a rape culture or a backlash.
These prurient scolds calling their group Feminists United on Campus (FUC) cannot see how this looks to normal people. They lack that capacity. They think they are being provocative, when they are simply being vulgar. The insider/outsider logic, however, only sees the outsider as an undifferentiated other. The people inside the group all think it is funny and meaningful and that’s all that matters.
[…] The reason, is it makes self-policing nearly impossible. It is impossible to not notice that when the NeverTrump clown car comes to a stop, the guys who pile out are wearing beanies. The whole NeverTrump thing looked like a Chinese restaurant on Christmas, because all of the outspoken members were obviously Jewish. People notice these things, no matter how much you scream at them about the sin of noticing. When guys like Bret Stephens write things like this, it’s as if he is trying to elicit The Backlash™. […]
That is a little Masterpiece you wrote Zman. A fine piece of critical writing indeed.
But WHY does the backlash never come? And will it never come? Throughout human history, people have struck back when they’re wronged. Are we some novelty, so enervated that we and our civilization will passively sink under the soil under unresisted blows? Or will there eventually be an explosion – a real backlash that will annihilate the enemy? I think the liberals are (as usual) playing with matches while imagining themselves putting out forest fires. They expect that SOME backlash will come, but they’re convinced that it will never be more than tiny little pinpricks of irritation. A guy with… Read more »
I used to work in the media, so I sort of know how these people think (at least used to think: I am retired now so my view may be somewhat out-of-date) The thing about journalists — and forget that they work in either the dead-tree business or the zappy, whizz-bang era of electronic gizmology — is that they all want the easy life. The old joke is that you can go to a war zone and report the horrors at great personal risk or you can sit in a nice office and type up press releases; both jobs pay… Read more »
Your moonbat friend’s opinions remind me of a quote, I think from one of the Founding Fathers: “It is impossible to reason oneself out of an opinion one did not reason oneself into in the first place.”
Yes, liberals really do believe they are above it all, that they shed partisanship, ideology or mere subjectivity like the Homo sapiens shed it’s tail. As far they are concerned, modern science affirms all progressive premises. Calling them partisan is almost hate speech. The apocalypse? That’s crazy bible thumper talk, but climate doom, pure cold logic (no pun intended), so why not strong-arm people into it? You can see this phenomena with Rush Limbaugh, he is always prefaced with “conservative” radio host, you don’t ever hear his name mentioned without the word conservative, or another insult, in the same sentence.… Read more »
An economic catastrophe might indeed bring the backlash they so fear.
Seems like these type of people need a taste of The Frontlash. An Andrew Breitbart-style in-your-face, take these moon bats to the woodshed Frontlash that they will regret they instigated. Alas, people with genuine sense view these Backlash Leftists as toddlers having tantrums and assume it will pass if ignored. Just another example of letting the Left control the narrative instead of providing an alternative to their utter nonsense. Some adults need to tell these toddlers Time Out!
The problem with that strategy is that on campus, the kooks hold all of the levers of power. So when (usually) some campus conservative group or (rarely) some alumni group hits them pre-emptively, the legions are mobilized. Investigations are launched. Petitions are lodged. The student newspaper is filled with howls of outrage and “investigative journalism” documenting how one of the conservative group members is a cad to women. Best case, the campus conservatives are frozen out: professors and fellow students are publicly or privately shaming and ostracizing them, grades fall, maybe an eagerly assisted transfer results. Worst case, they are… Read more »
I know this situation well: I was an undergrad at UMASS/Amherst back in the mid 80’s. The only thing that works is constant pushback. The Leftists never left that campus. But now they’re stronger than ever because no one dare confront their totalitarian hegemony for fear of either being called a “racist” or getting a bad grade for daring to articulate a conservative viewpoint. It makes no sense to go underground. You have to bring it to them. Hard. When you do, not only are you doing the right thing by opposing them, you are perhaps convincing other people who… Read more »