I’ve jokingly referred to The Backlash™ as if it were a creature from a Japanese monster movie, but it does function similarly. People go to horror movies to be scared, even though they know it is all made up nonsense. The experience taps into a primal fear of the unknown, but also confirms deeply held beliefs.
Since The Backlash™ is just made up and does not exist, Progressives either pretend really hard that it is lurking in the shadows or they just pretend it made an appearance and run around interviewing “witnesses.” They often sound like the girl from this scene in Ferris Bueller. “My best friend’s uncle’s aunt was walking down the street and heard someone say they heard The Backlash™ said mean things to people at the mall.”
It is in the The Backlash™ sightings we see just how choreographed the “news” is in modern America.
Rabia Chaudry kept her 7-year-old daughter home from her private Islamic school in Maryland on Thursday, fearing anti-Muslim backlash from Wednesday’s massacre nearly 3,000 miles away in San Bernardino, Calif.
“I think we are all feeling exhausted and very vulnerable,” said Chaudry, a lawyer and national security fellow at the New America Foundation. “I’m angry at those people who did this attack. And I’m angry at how this is being politicized. Everything boils down to, ‘We should fear Muslims. And they shouldn’t be here.’ ”
Rabia Chaudry is not just some random Muslim the Post found for this story. She is a professional nuisance who has been an agitator for some time. My bet is she is neighbors with one of the Post writers so they just waddled down the block, knowing that she is familiar with the drill. They pretend she is just a regular gal who happens to be a Muslim and she pretends to be afraid of normal Americans more than gun-toting Muslim fanatics.
Many Muslims said fear of Islam is being fueled by the heated rhetoric of Republican presidential candidates, particularly businessman Donald Trump, who has called for surveillance of some mosques and requiring Muslims to register with the government.
That may be smart electoral politics: A 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center showed that 82 percent of Republicans said they were “very concerned” about the rise of Islamic extremism in the world, compared with 51 percent of Democrats.
“Islamophobia is the accepted form of racism in America,” Iftikhar said. “Leaders like Donald Trump show us that you can take a potshot at Muslims and get away with it.”
Of course, this being the Post, they have to signal to the other side of the bipartisan fusion party that Muslims are now sacred people, along with blacks and single women. Failure to be enthusiastic for them is the same as being a fan of Hitler. Like all cults, Progressives will not accept indifference. You are either rabidly in favor of their cause or you are evil.
The demented part of the Progressive faith is what you see in that last bit. Ishtar has declared Islam a race because Ishtar knows that racism is a magic word, making your enemies disappear. Ishtar may not be terribly bright, but he has figured out who holds the whip in this country and what they call it.
The curious thing to me about the groups the Progressives have assembled for their coalition is that they are mostly fuck-ups. Muslims could quietly colonize America if they would just shut the fuck up and stop shooting people, but they can’t so we notice. Similarly, if blacks stopped keeping it realz and behaved themselves instead, they would be the Alawites of America and white people would be the Sunnis.
Anyway, one of my themes is that no society has a fixed set of values that are non-negotiable. Culture, like everything else in nature, adapts and evolves. The lesson learned from the 16th and 17th century was that official religions don’t work for large nation states so they were abandoned in favor of religious tolerance. America has that baked into the organizing documents.
The great challenge to the West over the next century is the population boom on the frontier. Managing it and defending against the consequences will be the all consuming issue of the West. Progressives are fighting the wars of the last century by running around attacking white Christians. The coming war is the war with Islam. The coalition of weirdos and fuck-ups the Left has assembled is not the right tool for that job. If you’re looking for a reason to be cheerful, it’s right there.
Backlash done right.
Sooner or later this country will get a leader (might even be called Mr. President) that it needs. Shortly afterwards ten or twenty Muslims will die, as suddenly as a gay man thrown off a tall building but with more noise. If they all fail to get the message then another fifty million or so will depart the same way. Any remaining Islamic nations will learn that being able to build a nuclear weapon is nice, being able to deliver one on time and with pinpoint accuracy is better.
New math: At fifty million a pop, how long before you run out of Muslims?
Here’s part of a recent tweet I read: “a gun filled country caught up in a frenzy of Muslim bashing”. Where as that, I wonder.
https://mobile.twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/672862417227919361
“BACKLASH” was when violent mobs of Islamaphobic NYers stormed Atlantic Ave enmasse burning & smashing the windows of all the Arab stores on 9/12/01, and then proceeded to torch a few Brooklyn mosques. Oh wait that didn’t happen. Instead there was a few instances of drunk guys yelling “raghead” at some Sikhs. If nothing happened after 9/11 except increasing Muslim immigration into the US & an attempt to build a Ground Zero Mosque, there will be no backlash now.
The “Backlash” is a linchpin of the fantasies that progressives tell themselves so that they can continue to engage in a distorted game of psychological displacement, moral equivalence and minority grievances rather than face facts. In the case of Islam, the imminent arrival of the Backlash is alleged again and again (and with nary a shred of evidence of having ever arrived – it’s the Great Pumpkin of political retribution) to uphold the core belief that vast hordes of largely imaginary bad whites are violent bigots. If bad whites are violent bigots, then Muslims are aggrieved victims, and Muslim violence, while perhaps regrettable, is an understandable reaction to a long chain of unbearable injustices. When rationalized in this way, progressives can avoid uncomfortable dilemmas themselves, such as having to account for the actual doctrines of Islamic faith and its history of violence and conquest. When slightly reconfigured, the same scenario plays out for blacks.
The circularity of the reasoning is immensely satisfying, since as long as the core postulates remain undisturbed, the chain of logic, such as it is, remains unassailable. Which is of course why the core postulates, absurd and tired as they may be, must be revived and reiterated with such rabid and unrelenting determination and consistency.
The payoff is the continual reassurance that the holder of these beliefs is on of the elect, one of the “good” as opposed to one of the bad, whites. The desperate need to be one of the elected good seems to override the usual instincts for survival based on the application of common sense to potentially threatening situations – and hence we have the growing chasm in our politics between those who need to maintain their righteousness and those of us who would like to live to see another day by acting with prudence.
I only disagree on one point. “The coming war is the war with Islam.” That war has been in progress for a while, our betters just don’t want to acknowledge the fact, lest they have to actually prosecute a war and accept all kinds of “icky bad think.” Or what you might call, objective reality.
That war has been going on for a very, very long time. In fact Islam has been at war with the civilized world for most of it’s existence.
While I agree that the muslim cause would be helped enormously if they stopped killing people, they also know that we are getting used to them killing people. Soon it won’t be a shock when someone tells you: “It was a mass murder and the shooter/bomber was a muslim.” We will become so used to it we will just shrug and say, “Again? Oh well, that’s what they do, that’s what we expect,” and carry on pretending all is well.
Of course their cause is greatly helped by non-muslims who convince themselves that no muslim nurses a grudge or violent thought or has read anything inflammatory, though perhaps one day even the most loyal member of the Non-Noticers will realise that the Religion of Peace somehow manages to spawn a lot of lone wolfs who kill plenty of people.
Yeah, it is not hard to imagine the weather forecast being modified into the Jihad forecast. “Bring your umbrella and body armor. In addition to rain today, there’s a 70% chance of suicide bomber in the forecast!”
The coalition of weirdos and fuck-ups the Left has assembled is not the right tool for that job. If you’re looking for a reason to be cheerful, it’s right there.
I often wonder about that myself — the fate of individual Leftists when Leftism (in its current configuration) is not just discredited, but actively mocked and reviled. I’m pretty sure that in the best case scenario, my little nieces and nephews will grow up in a world where quaint notions like The Backlash (TM), “-phobia” of any kind, mass immigration, feminism, and the whole identity politics schmear are regarded in the same way we view witchcraft and the divine right of kings — weird mental artifacts from the dark ages, stuff we can’t believe anyone ever took seriously, much less ruined lives over. (Worst case scenario: Anyone caught reading a cultural history of the early 21st century will be denounced and summarily shot).
As you so often point out, Leftism isn’t a set of policy positions. It’s a cult, and the cult’s dogma can change on a dime without notice. All good Progressives know we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, and when the social climate flips from “anti-racism” to “racism-plus,” the Salon.coms of the world will be out there leading the charge for roundups, camps, and mass deportations. Today’s blue-haired bicurious vegan brony is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer.
But… will they be allowed to get away with it this time? After all, the internet is forever. Will there be Committees of Truth and Reconciliation, post WWII-style, going after Vichy Americans? “Professor Jones, you stand accused of having taught a class on the gendered tropes of Saturday morning cartoons. How do you plead?”
Things I like to say out loud, in public:
Islam is a set of beliefs, not a race
Many of these beliefs center around conquest, subjugation, and slaughter
Islam requires gays to be killed and rape victims stoned to death
Yes, some cultures are superior to others, particularly Western culture
Well, they got a couple things right – women can’t drive, and they own slaves
Marrying a 9 year old is – kinda creepy, no?
And many, many more true, non-offensive observations can and should be made whenever appropriate.
Islam is a race of a sort. Polygamy and consanguinity reinforce clannishness to a degree that is impervious to advanced civilization. If a lion could speak we could not understand him.
Where disastrous breeding habits meet Islam they mutually reinforce each other. People of different ethnicities, languages, and forms of Islam may join in jihad against the one singular strange beast, and then get back to fighting each other.