Andy Ngo on paying the price for other people’s intersectional piety:

[Portland bakery owner, John] Blomgren’s chronology matches and corroborates [his employees’] version of events. However, having established that his staff had done nothing wrong did not alter Blomgren’s decision to fire them. “In this situation it doesn’t really matter that the two staff members working are not themselves racist because the call they made to deny [student and activist, Lillian Green] service caused her to feel like she had been discriminated against,” his statement explained. “Sometimes impact outweighs intent and when that happens people do need to be held accountable.” The bakery has since deleted this statement and denies firing the employees to “save face or to appease anyone.”

If the word accountable has a perverse and sour ring to it, it should. “Dismantling the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy,” as Mr Blomgren puts it, is apparently something that small eateries should do now, ostentatiously, above all else, and is best achieved, it seems, by firing female employees for the sin of doing their jobs. Mr Ngo covers the escalating drama, and others, in some detail, and none of it is particularly encouraging. But it does reveal quite a lot about who such people are, the psychology in play, and the consequences of prostrating yourself in front of relentlessly spiteful “social justice” bedlamites.

The section on Cameron Whitten, one of Portland’s more prominent “social justice” activists, is also worth highlighting:

“I think he’s actually a sociopath,” speculates ‘Alex,’ a Portland-based social justice activist who has worked extensively with Whitten and witnessed his strategic use of baseless accusations of racism to take down opponents and manipulate allies. Fearful of retribution given Whitten’s growing influence, Alex spoke to me on condition of anonymity but provided evidence of their relationship. “He’s created a chilling effect in Portland. People are scared of him and no one knows how to intervene.” Alex expressed sympathy for Blomgren and said Whitten selects his targets carefully — mainly white progressives who are likely to trip over themselves when accused of racism. Some of them offer him money or career opportunities.

If you think the word sociopath sounds a bit strong, do read the whole thing.

In the comments, Rafi notes that the above bears a striking resemblance to a protection racket, which it pretty much is. It certainly seems to have attracted the kinds of personalities that you’d expect to find involved in one. And if you encourage the credulous to cultivate delusions of collective guilt, and to contort themselves, abase themselves, in order to conform – and if you do it institutionally, systemically, in the name of progressive education – then it’s hardly surprising that moochers, narcissists and marginal personalities waste no time in exploiting it.

Previously, this and this.

“You’re a mean, mad, white man.”

In the video below, Jordan Peterson, Stephen Fry, Michelle Goldberg and Michael Dyson debate political correctness and “white privilege.”

Rafi steers us to this article by Charlotte Allen on the ever-narrowing parameters of leftist tolerance. The following extract, on her attempts to cover a “white privilege” conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, may be of particular interest:

I had already covered the White Privilege Conference for the Weekly Standard in 2013, when it had met at a Seattle airport hotel. Back then, the conference had struck me strictly as a subject for laughs… So my story had highlighted the conference’s most salient feature: that although minority-group victimologists were robustly represented, many of the speakers, and certainly most of the audience, consisted of white people feeling guilty for being white.

I gently poked fun at the George Mason University professor who got up onstage to apologise that his pants had been stitched in a sweatshop in Bangladesh; the soi-disant American Indian activist who had been ousted as tribal chief for financial mismanagement after a large sum of money went missing; and the large percentage of conference workshop leaders who seemed actually to be flogging their books and hustling for participants to sign up as paying customers for their own white-privilege conferences elsewhere. […]

I returned to the scene in 2018 because during the intervening five years “white privilege” seemed to have mushroomed from a zany preoccupation of far-left professors into a mainstream pedagogical trend. Just a few days ago elementary-school teachers in Raleigh, N.C., sent second-graders home with a sheet for their parents titled “11-Step Guide to Race, Racism, and White Privilege.” The sheet proffered such injunctions as “Drop ‘colourblindedness’ (which is arguably an ableist term anyway)” and “Only white people can be racist.” The white-privilege movement had become serious — and a serious threat to those who declined to be indoctrinated or to have their children indoctrinated.

Do read the whole thing.

Previously on the Planet of the Bedlamites.

Attention, all white women. You and your “whiteness” are “causing real harm and violence.” You are, to put it bluntly, “a perpetrator of harm.”

And so, obviously, what you need is a workshop, where you can “confront your participation in the oppression of others,” which is to say, “confront white womanhood,” and thereby be in “true solidarity” with beings of colour, who are flawless, downtrodden and inherently more noble. Given your own vile and corrupting nature, interaction with beings of colour must only be attempted after following the guidance of suitably enlightened instructors. Instructors who will bestow intersectional epiphanies by steering you to the works of these lofty, selfless warriors, and also to articles published in that high-minded journal for troubled women, Everyday Feminism. 

For a mere $20, you could be stewing in the wisdom of, among others, “artist and activist” Heather Marie Scholl, who was famously interviewed by Gavin McInnes, and whose creative efforts “examine white women’s roles in the establishment and maintenance of white supremacy through… embroidery techniques.” When not toppling the patriarchy with unattractive needlework, or “approaching social justice issues with a productive emotionality,” Ms Scholl boasts of her “BA from The Evergreen State College in Race, Gender and Sexuality.”

So, ladies. Sunday March 4 is the date for your diary. Book early. 

A Harvard-educated sociology professor named Crystal Fleming – whose areas of expertise include “critical race theory” and “mindfulness and spirituality” – wishes to share her wisdom. Specifically, that we shouldn’t judge people who smash the windows of local stores and loot multiple pairs of trainers while the owners of said stores are distracted by an oncoming hurricane.

Because white people. 

And if you don’t understand why Everything Is Racist, Including You™ and why looting local stores for half a dozen pairs of expensive fashion items is therefore totes okay, it’s “very, very sad.” You see, “white supremacist racism” is all about “hoarding resources.”