The Fake Left

 By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

First it was farmers. Then coal miners and factory workers. And then minorities, first in this country and then abroad, who were the latest candidates for the oppressed of the year.

But beyond searching for victims to represent, the Left was really searching for authenticity.

The Left, for all its protestations about the travails of the working class, is a movement of radical intellectuals, effete upper-class dilettantes and professional activists who are detached from the ‘plight’ of the ‘proletariat’ whose rights they claim to be campaigning for. Its academic theories, from Marxism on down, are not grounded in anything except abstract sophistry marshaled on behalf of the perpetually oppressed who are to benefit from the totalitarian rule of the Left.

The inauthenticity of the Left, its power and privilege, its detachment from what it considers to be ordinary life, leaves it forever searching for authentic victims, whose lives follow the patterns of socialist theories, rather than being the ones who stand apart and make those theories.

The mimicry of working-class attire by leftists had been mocked as far back as Orwell. Radicals who didn’t work loved adopting the costumes and accents of the working class as if they were ideological method actors who could discover the authenticity they lacked by playing a part. (It is no coincidence that acting is a profession rife with leftist politics and that so many of those who play the embodiment of the ordinary man or woman on screen proved to be nothing of the sort. To paraphrase Shakespeare, all the Left’s a stage and its activists mere players.)

Leftists search for the missing authenticity by trying to embed themselves into the lives of the authentic ‘working class’. In the 19th century, they rallied for farmers and tried to become them. Wealthy urbane intellectuals engaged in doomed efforts to run farms, growing apples and raising hens in New England with invariably disastrous results that left them bankrupt and in debt, without having learned a single thing from the experience.

Except to denounce ‘mercantilism’ and later capitalism for their failures.

19th century leftist intellectuals, individually or as part of the growing trend of Fourierist communes, lacked the discipline for the backbreaking work and painstaking planning involved in farming. Rather than leading them to question whether they could run entire societies when they could not even manage a farm, they decided that the problem was with farming, not with them.

And that is what the Left always does. Rather than acknowledge that their failures stem from hubris and a lack of discipline, they instead blame them on the general state of society.

By the 20th century, they had turned away from farmers, who had proven that they were not fertile ground for their ideology, to factory workers and miners who were more willing to form unions. The new working-class ideal was no longer Fourier’s massive agriculture communes, but massive industrialization that appeared to be made for socialist central planning. Unlike agriculture which was subject to the vicissitudes of the weather, every element of the industrial process from mining to the finished product appeared controllable and subject to their theories.

The Soviet Union purged farmers and built-up industrialization, as Communist China would do in more recent times, leading to massive famines in both dictatorships. Russia and China reviled farmers as reactionaries and their mismanagement of agriculture collectively killed millions. The USSR became dependent on American agricultural imports and China may dump its junk on Americans on an incredible scale, but still imports agricultural products from America.

In America, the factory workers and miners eventually proved disappointingly conservative. Both the international Marxist movements and American leftists moved on to minorities who were seen as truly authentic revolutionary bases who would not be seduced by capitalism. Third world terrorism, especially in Latin America and the Muslim world, became the new ideal.

Western leftists began admiring and trying to imitate Che and Arafat. Then Hugo Chavez and Hamas. They gave up on the white working class entirely, then on men and everyone else. The vast majority of Americans, like the farmers, the workers and the miners, were no longer seen as ‘authentic’ and lost their ideological central place in the grand schemes of socialism.

The Left’s pursuit of authenticity was a response to its own unreality. The more unreal it became, the more it became obsessed with finding the authenticity in others that it lacked. As a movement trying to escape from itself, it could never achieve its real goal of embodying its shifting fashionable notions of the ‘salt of the earth’ who had the gift of making things work.

The ‘authenticity vampires’ who live on laptops but sound like they are struggling in salt mines always talk about ‘fighting for the people’, not because they love the people, but because they want to become them. They attach themselves to what they deem to be the working class to drain them of that authenticity, and then, like vampires, kill them off and replace them.

The crisis of the radical intellectuals is that they reject what they are, they reject the world as it is and they build their lives around fantasies that have no connection to their real selves or to reality. If they had the love for labor that they claim to, they would recognize their own decadence, but instead they aspire to be a supreme ruling class, the ‘first citizens’ of a class they do not even belong to.

A true society of workers would have no place for the sorts of people who theorize about it. A society of workers would understand why the various theories of those who pretend to speak for the working class are actually unworkable. The Left is not a society of workers, but of theorizers, whose theories never work, but who collude to perpetrate a massive fantasy on the public.

The world’s greatest con job.

Leftists began by fooling themselves and then fooling everyone else. Like all liars, they are desperately hungry for some truths to hang over their vast infrastructure of deceits. That is the authenticity they seek. Some truth to make the lies that they tell to themselves and to us seem plausible. Leftists put on working-class outfits, shabby, ripped and worn clothes, use lower class accents, embrace their music and what they think is their culture to find the truth.

But eventually this fake authenticity wears thin and they have to exchange it for another one. And they tell themselves that time this it will work and radical Pinocchio will become a real boy.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Victimhood is an Oppressive System of Relative Rights

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog  

We are two years and spare change away from the American semiquincentennial which will celebrate 250 years since some brave men ratified the foundational document of our nation.

The Declaration of Independence’s bold assertion that the people were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” is all the more relevant in the age of relativism where fewer people believe in a ‘Creator’ or in unalienable rights. That radical document is why America remains the only place on the planet where freedom of speech is absolute.

Other nations have their constitutions and human rights charters which run longer than an old-fashioned telephone directory, but their rights are granted by the government and then taken away by the government. Under the guise of buzzwords like ‘stakeholders’ and ‘evolving social contracts’ your rights are constantly reevaluated by committees according to leftist doctrine.

Unlike the absolute rights of the Bill of Rights, the reevaluation of rights follows a Marxist paradigm in which the existing state of rights is an imperfect system imposed by the privileged on the underprivileged, and must be constantly shaken up to liberate the new oppressed.

Your rights are not absolute, they are relative to how oppressed the committee thinks you are. And if you’re only as free as your oppression, then you have to be oppressed to have rights.

These rights are not a gift from the Creator, but from systemic racism, that you have rights is not something to be proud of or grateful for, but a mark of shame that indicts you for having benefited from whiteness, being adjacent to whiteness, the patriarchy, heteropatriarchy or cisheteropatriarchy, and the only way to atone is to cede your rights to the next group.

The clash between traditional feminism and the transgender movement clearly shows the difference between absolute and relative rights. In the absolute rights model, equality for women would have been a permanent victory, but in the relative rights model, by winning equal rights, women stopped being the oppressed and instead became the oppressors of transgender men.

Feminists have responded to the transgender movement with both absolute and relative arguments. The absolute argument is that womanhood is a fundamental biological reality and not a relative state of mind that can be redistributed to anyone who comes asking for it. The relative one is, like nearly all relative rights arguments, an assertion of unique victimhood.

The Marxist paradigm easily defeats past claims of victimhood. By the sixties, the old class warfare model had evolved to adopt and dispose of such past claims like an efficient factory, beginning with the original class of victims, the white working class, once the vanguard of the revolution, but quickly banished to the ranks of reactionaries and oppressors of the oppressed.

From the lofty progressive vantage point of the current year, every domestic group on whose behalf the leftists of a century ago had advocated, coal miners, factory workers, women, Italian and Jewish immigrants, the rural poor, have now become the contemptible enemies of mankind.

At the rapid pace of radicalization, everyone from white gay men to black men to lesbians, are being prepped for the social abattoir. By 2035, the only true victims may be groups so bizarre and warped as to be barely conceivable today. Before they too are exposed as the oppressors.

Under intersectionality, each right is also a wrong, and each liberation conceals another oppression. The process of liberation is a constant search for new wrongs, new minorities to liberate and then denounce in a constant upheaval of society that masks the oppressive transfer of power from the citizenry to a revolutionary vanguard that also doubles as the true ruling class.

The true oppression is a liberation movement that frees no one, only pits people against one another, giving each grievance its hour in the sun, before turning the aggrieved into the aggressors, so that only the revolutionaries can ever wield any meaningful power by arbitrating who the oppressors and the oppressed are at given moment.

And that is what relative rights look like.

When rights are dependent on defining who the oppressed and the oppressors are, then those rights are not truly inalienable rights given by the Creator or by a foundational document, but by the constantly shifting paradigms of academia and the accompanying leftist politics.

Who the oppressed and the oppressors are can change overnight, as feminists found out. Yesterday, women were the oppressed, today any man who puts on a dress is oppressed.

The difference between your rights being determined day to day by King George III or the editorial department of the New York Times is a preference for one tyranny over another.

Absolute rights, like those in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, build one achievement on top of another. And that is the rights that most Americans, even most liberals, thought that they were getting, but instead the oppressed groups of yesterday wonder why the revolutionary moment seems to have passed them by leaving them with less than they had.

What happened to the revolution, they wonder? What happened is that it’s a revolution.

A revolution is a state of instability. Freedom doesn’t come from revolutions, but from the order that emerges afterward. That’s why Americans commemorate July 4th, 1776 as Independence Day. July 4th was neither the first nor the final shot fired for independence. Like the French, we could have made an original violent confrontation, the Boston Massacre, into our Bastille Day. Or we could have made Evacuation Day, a mostly forgotten holiday marking the British departure from New York City and the end of British rule, into the date of our independence.

But instead we chose to commemorate the aspirational vision of the Declaration of Independence. Revolutions and battles come and go, but we wanted to build our independence around a new order of liberty, not around the perpetual revolution championed by some radicals.

In my book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left, I described the radical American leftists who wanted to perpetuate the revolution and saw France as a model.

“Eternal providence called on you, you alone, since the world began, to reestablish on earth the empire of justice and liberty,” Robespierre had rhapsodized. During the Reign of Terror, the French leftist had assured fellow radicals that it would all be worth it for, “by sealing our work with our blood, we may witness at least the dawn of universal happiness.”

Some American leftists plotted to topple George Washington and the Constitution to pursue a French style perpetual revolution that would, after enough bloodshed, offer universal happiness.

Today the “dawn of universal happiness” has been replaced by the “right side of history”, but both are revolutionary movements of relative rights that are always incomplete and seeking perfection. But human affairs are by definition imperfect. The American experiment offered the security of absolute rights while the leftist approach is to rob of everyone of their rights over and over in search of the perfect state, the empire of justice and liberty, and the right side of history.

The real struggle is still between the absolute rights guaranteed nearly 250 years ago by the Declaration of Independence, and the relative rights promised by the leftist revolutions which are still going on today. And it is this clash of rights that will determine the future of our rights. 

 

 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

We Are the Victims and Everything We Do is Justified

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

At the heart of everything from the debate over the Gaza War to DEI to toxic interpersonal relationships is a disastrous loop known as the “self-reinforcing victim/villain” cycle.

The self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle is a deceptively simple and incredibly destructive paradigm for any kind of relationship, national, communal or personal, in which one party constantly attacks the other while claiming that it is the victim fighting against oppression.

The paradigm is guided by the idea that there is a permanently fixed victim and villain, that the victim is constantly suffering attacks from the villain and that anything the victim does is justified because he or she has no agency except to resist the assaults of the villain.

While some Hamas supporters have lied or tried to cover up the atrocities of Oct 7, Ghazi Hammad, a Hamas official, initially denied them, but then burst out with, “the existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is justified.”

“We are the victims”, “nobody should blame us” and “everything we do is justified” perfectly capture the cruel workings of the cycle. So many westerners have sided with Hamas because they accept, incorporate and make use of the same cycle in their own politics and lives.

The very same arguments adapted from Marxism and therapy culture play out routinely in “whiteness” and “colonialist” discourse in America, Europe and other free world nations.

The “self-reinforcing victim/villain” cycle dispenses with arguments, evidence or any reasoned assessments of rights. These may occasionally be thrown in when convenient, but make no real difference because the central premise of the cycle is the lack of any objective standard that both sides have to meet. International law, racial tolerance, peace treaties or negotiations are invoked in a purely one-sided fashion. It is understood that the officially designated victim never has to abide by international law, to stop hating or to sincerely agree to stop the violence.

Any of the invoked appeals to any larger principle are usually rigged in such a way as to render mutuality meaningless. For example, racism has been redefined to mean racial hatred practiced by those with power, making them the officially designated villains, while racial hatred from victims has been designated “reverse racism”: a justified response to the racism of the majority.

Once again, “we are the victims”, “nobody should blame us” and “everything we do is justified”.

Similarly, international law is held to apply only to Israel as the “occupier” while no one can expect anything of the Muslim terrorists who are “occupied” and therefore have the right to “resist” by invading Israel and burning Jewish families alive in their own homes.

The perpetrators are omnipotent by virtue of being helpless, since they can do nothing, they can do everything, as victims of oppression they have no agency and also no restraint under any norms, either those of decency, humanity, the laws of war or any concept of right and wrong.

They cannot be asked not to rage, that’s “tone policing”, not to hate, that’s “reverse racism” or even not to kill because that’s “dictating to oppressed people the forms of their resistance”.

Whatever they do is not a reflection on their own morality, but on the oppression they suffer.

If they hate, it’s because they have been hated and if they kill, it’s because they have been killed. The worse the crimes they commit, the more we are told that the horrors they perpetrate are a reflection of the horrors they have suffered. When suicide bombers emerged on the scene, we were told that they were a sign of how desperate the killers must be after such suffering.

No crime, not even those committed on Oct 7, was allowed to be seen as a deliberate choice.

The moral numbness of the self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle has long haunted liberal minds. As Nazi Germany invaded Poland and began the process that would lead to the mass murder of millions of Jews, the poet W.H. Auden penned a hasty condemnation of Nazism, but threw in four lines that became the best known from the poem. “I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.”

Those same four lines appear in disguised or undisguised form in every account of the Oct 7 attacks and in every account of the violence committed by leftists and their allies.

How often during the BLM riots were we treated to the MLK quote that, “a riot is the voice of the unheard” which was never intended to be a blank check for urban violence, but is used to shift the agency from the young men beating an old man in the street to the body at their feet.

The insistence that evil is a cycle not a choice, that the Nazis were victims rather than perpetrators, that every terrorist and rioter in the world could not do otherwise is an unlimited license for evil. And evil is not a cycle: it is a choice that each and every one of us makes.

Oct 7 is far from the first time that “we are the victims”, “nobody should blame us” and “everything we do is justified” licensed genocide. And it will certainly not be the last.

Why did so many radicals jump into supporting Hamas after Oct 7 rather than disavow it?

The atrocities did not alienate, they incited. The crimes offered the same heady promise that the Left had since the French Revolution of committing the worst possible crimes while being morally righteous because each horror was a response to the horrors visited upon them.

When there are no objective standards, all that remains are the propaganda narratives that justify violence. The self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle sheds standards. It asserts pain and suffering. It spends all of its time demonizing those it wishes to kill. And then it kills them.

The crybullies, the victims who kill, spend all of their time asserting their trauma, they project hate as pain, murderousness as trauma and assaults as resistance. Even as cities and countries burn, they always talk about themselves while raging when anyone mentions the damage.

Attempting to find common ground with them is futile. Proposals for reforms or compromises are treated as admissions of guilt. Negotiations are blown up because the professional victims don’t want a deal, they want to continue the hate and violence, and they only use negotiations to assert their endless suffering which can only be remedied with the destruction of their targets.

Some attempt to meet them blow for blow, by asserting their own victimhood, and yet this strategy is bound to fail because the underlying premise of the self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle is the “punching up” and “punching down” one of wokeness that only some people’s pain and some people’s lives matter, that those who have “power” are always perpetrators, and those who claim to be “powerless” are always their victims no matter who is actually doing what.

No matter how much those charged with having “power”,deny it, back away from it, leave, turn over control, and cut deals, the underlying dynamic can never be allowed to change anywhere.

Pro-Israel activists, especially liberal ones, still don’t understand this dynamic and are pained and shocked at how their former allies can justify mass murder and rape at a music festival. But the answer is that it’s the same way that supporters of BLM justified torching cities. The self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle rejects any morality except assertions of powerlessness.

Whoever has the most power is accused of setting the cycle into motion and can never assert innocence again even as the Nazis are goose stepping their way into Poland.

What is the answer to the self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle’s endless “you made me do it”?

Giving up power isn’t the answer. Some adopt a Stockholm Syndrome strategy of admitting guilt and promising to “do better”, they clamor to be “allies” and loudly denounce their own people. But when the violence begins, the Stockholmers don’t do any better than anyone else. Whether it’s the Hamas attacks or BLM riots, the appeasers and the apologists were caught up in them.

Some died.

An argument cannot be won by arguing using the self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle’s rules. It is important to think back to a time before the cultural poison reduced every exchange to Marxist logic and social media narcissism when we actually knew what right and wrong looked like.

And the only way to do that is by demolishing the cult of victimhood.

Right and wrong are not determined by expressions of pain. While some people may have more power than others, no one is truly powerless or lacks agency. Whatever happens, everyone has a choice in how they respond to it. That choice defines who they are for as long as they keep making it. People are not the products of impersonal forces, but of those choices.

Anyone can be a victim, but no one has to choose to continue being one unless it’s a role they want to play. And anyone from narcissists to aspiring tyrants finds that to be a useful role.

Most of those who assert victimhood were never victims at all. The most malignant victimhood behavior comes from the powerful and the privileged who use it to claim moral immunity. Lenin came from a noble family and Castro was the son of a plantation owner. Osama bin Laden came from a billionaire family. Hamas had its origins in high officials who were displaced by the fall of the Ottoman Empire and whose families have become millionaires through terrorism.

Every evil movement, including the Nazis, claimed to be the victims, but they’re only the victims of their own thwarted ambitions. Today’s totalitarians who claim to be victims are like them the victims of their futile dreams of conquest and of grinding everyone else under their boots.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

The Dead End Of Victimhood Benefits Only Its Promoters

October 29, 2023 By Vince Coyner

For weeks, we’ve seen videos exposing Hamas’s depravity. Its soldiers’ blatant disregard for human life and the seeming joy with which they carried out their depravity was disheartening.

Sadly, this kind of depravity can be found closer to home, too, where videos abound of black crime across America, with people shot, pushed in front of trains, sucker punched, beaten to a pulp, and even killed by individuals, gangs, or groups of “teens.”

In both cases, the perpetrators have an ostensible enemy at whom their anger is directed. For Hamas, it’s Jews, and for blacks, it’s whites. Apologists for both groups claim it’s the actions of the “oppressor” that caused the “victims” to react. For Hamas, it’s Jews “stealing” Palestinian lands. For blacks, it’s slavery and Jim Crow. In both cases, though, the outsized violence against bystanders demonstrates that those are just convenient justifications for evil people to gain power.

Hamas’s soldiers, while blaming Jews for everything, often target Muslims as well. They also carelessly target their weapons, striking their own people, while hiding soldiers and materials behind women and children in mosques, schools, and hospitals. When Israel retaliates and civilians die, the resulting images make great PR.............To Read More...

The Lives of Our Family and Neighbors Depends Upon Our Ability To Defend Them

October 4, 2023by Robert Socha @ Daily Rant

Everyone who values life and liberty should carry a gun.

The ethnic violence in major cities run by Leftist governments in these United States is far past time to take serious notice and prepare to defend yourself, your family, and your property. One of the surest deterrents is to carry a gun and have the skill to use it when necessary.

The Second Amendment is paramount in encouraging this defense. The wisdom contained in this verse reveals a stark poison in the unredeemed, unrepentant human nature that requires vigilance to overcome.

Bastiat stated in The Law that if the punishment for the crime is inadequate, the populace will continue to act criminally until the law is stringent enough to bring a deterrent. There is no deterrent in our once beautiful cities, and crime is rampant. Horrifically, the trend where black thugs are indiscriminately targeting white people has manifested in multiple murders and mayhem. And the targeting and looting of stores is seriously being cast as a form of reparations and excused behavior from our elected officials. This ungodly cohort has delegitimized our laws and made a mockery of justice.

Another tragedy is that since my ancestry comes mainly from Poland, Spain, and Italy, I feel tremendous angst bringing this subject to light because popular culture has declared my voice cancerous and I have severe misgivings about writing this piece because of the ethnic tensions fueled and manufactured by our Leftist politicians, the media, and wealthy influencers. After all, I dare to expose this present darkness. I write, nevertheless.

I will not provide links to the plethora of shocking video evidence proving this assertion. I do not intend to add any fuel to either side of this terrible divide. I am simply bringing attention to its pervasiveness and the necessity of preparation.

This preparedness includes being aware of your surroundings and constantly vigilant to protect yourself and your property. For example, our family SUV has key-fobs that automatically unlock the doors when you are in close proximity to the vehicle. Unfortunately, this model creates a vulnerability, especially at a gas station or in a parking lot, for an unknown person could open the passenger side doors and do any number of illegal activities. I have disabled this feature. Now we have the first-world pain of taking the key fob out of our pocket and pressing the unlock key, once for the driver’s door only and twice for all doors, which affords additional protection.

How have we allowed ourselves to descend into this social anarchy and self-deprecation? Because we have abandoned the former ways. We have chosen to worship light and transient causes. We have called evil good and good evil. We have made excuses for deplorable behavior. We have allowed certain classes to go unpunished. We have erred terribly, bringing on such corruption that most Americans are in unseen chains, forcing us to build a kingdom whose foundation is falsehood and pillars are depravity and shame.

We must recognize the times and understand them with knowledge of what we should do[i]. We should stringently advocate to bring back the rule of law and punishment for crime, especially social unrest and plunder. We should encourage our governments, from the local municipalities to the state and federal levels, to give law enforcement teeth again to arrest and detain shoplifters, muggers, and other violent criminals. We must boldly insist that the infestation of mind-altering substances must be culled and discouraged through stringent enforcement. No longer should it be acceptable for fentanyl-high people to litter our streets. It is immoral to take one man’s wealth through taxation or theft and give it to another. Additionally, acting violently on behalf of a cause or indiscriminately targeting violence, especially assault, should be condemned at the highest levels and justly adjudicated.

 Tags: Gun Ownership  Political, Christian and Conservative Issues

[i] 1 Chronicles 12:32

About the Author: Robert Socha  (so-ha), was born in southern California. He served 5 years 3 months active duty in the United States Air Force; honorably. After his service he took an Associate’s Degree in Practical Theology, where, through his studies, developed a deep love of God and Country and sincere appreciation of the value of Liberty. Robert and his beloved wife of 21-plus years are raising 4 beautiful Texan children. They moved to Hillsdale, Michigan, in 2013, to put their children in Hillsdale Academy. Robert is a sales professional. He and his wife consider Michigan a hidden gem, and absolutely love this city and state (current political environment notwithstanding) they’ve adopted.

A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail

By Daniel Greenfield January 21, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

America has become a nation of ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’. Everyone is getting over a ‘trauma’ or ‘processing’. They demand special privileges because of the suffering of their ancestors. They trot out studies which prove that they are somehow disadvantaged. They gorge on self-help books and deploy therapy terminology to accuse everyone else of mistreating them.

Our society has turned into a cross between a Marxist academic conference and therapy session where Marxist terminology like “systemic racism” and therapy talk like “gaslighting narcissist” form key parts of the grammar of perpetual victimhood.

Politics has been reduced to victimhood advocacy and we are worse off for it.

Victims are not good people. Postmodern influencer culture conflates ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, but they are two very different things. Survivors are people who pick themselves up and go on. Victims give up and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing except blaming everyone else.

After the slaves were freed, some made long journeys to major cities, others built families and worked hard to provide for them. They persevered despite lynchings and racism. Over 150 years later, some of their descendants claim that nothing can be expected from them because they’re suffering from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome even though the only place they’ve seen slavery is on television. That’s the difference between survivors and victims.

After the Holocaust, Jewish people who had seen their entire families killed in front of them remarried, had children and started their lives again. Often they didn’t even talk about what they had experienced until decades had passed. Others helped build a nation out of the desert sands. Now some of their great-grandchildren claim they’re so fragile they need safe spaces.

The same is true of all Americans. We are all the descendants of survivors. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought in wars, persisted through economic turmoil and didn’t give up. Whatever happened to them, they didn’t see themselves as the victims. They were strong, not because they postured on social media, but because they got up whenever they were knocked down. They had their grievances and resentments, but they didn’t build their lives around them.

Survivors are motivated by love and duty. They understand that there is more to life than their own pain. They redeem their suffering by making their lives matter. That is the essence of the human ideal. It’s how nations and families are built. And it’s how our nation is coming apart.

Victims are driven by hate. Their pain is performance. It’s what makes them special and the only purpose left to them. The more they feel, the angrier they get. And they want to be angry. There are victims who have actually suffered, but the majority in our culture are ‘identity victims’ or ‘therapy victims’ whose victimhood is based on the terminology of academic Marxism or shrink sessions: who have suffered nothing except a lack of emotional fulfillment.

These creatures, who once handed out radical fliers at campus cafes and poisoned family reunions, went ‘viral’ through social media and generated legions of sympathetic followers. Their perpetual outrage at being victims drives our culture and our politics. Incapable of talking about anything other than themselves, they have ‘built their brand’ into the model for our society.

America went from a nation of courage, allegiance and responsibility where people made commitments to something larger than themselves, used their pain to build better things, to a society of wallowers competing over who has the biggest pain and the least responsibility.

The difference between survivors and victims is that survivors have a larger purpose, while victims have made victimhood into their purpose. And they want it to be our purpose.

Politics has become a dysfunctional therapy session, an intersectional debate over whose pain is superior, and who is just faking it, as if nations are defined by individual pain rather than cultures of aspiration. New victimhood causes proliferate every day while the old ones fight it out. Whose pain is superior, feminists or transgender men? Trauma is our national resource now and there’s only so much of it to go around. Those who have the most are at the top.

Victimhood grants a moral superiority that liberates the victim from moral responsibility.

If you’re an official victim, you can rampage around cities, looting, beating and burning, with few legal and certainly no moral consequences. Beyond economics, replacing ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ takes us from an equality of moral obligations to an equity of moral outcomes. And race riots, canceling people, and rigging college admissions are just ways of achieving ‘moral equity’.

Behavior that is objectively wrong, violence, hate, harassment and terrorism, becomes right if the perpetrators are victims who claim to be striving for a society of moral equity. But the truth about victims is that they never want to stop being what they are. If they did, they would become survivors. Victimhood is convenient and comforting. Victims never have to learn to do better. They spend all of their time telling others to do better so that xer’s feelings aren’t hurt again.

Victimhood views failure as a conspiracy, rather than a choice, and nations and societies that embrace victimhood quickly turn into failed states. America used to get things done. Now we no longer win wars or can even stock supermarkets. There are a thousand points of failure and they begin with a culture that is hostile to achievement and supportive of victimhood.

Our educational system promotes those who refuse to learn, government subsidizes professional victimhood and corporations overlook those who work in favor of those who don’t, but are more likely to sue or throw a public tantrum. Trillions are spent with no return and nothing gets done because the real product is the virtue signaling of victimhood.

Victimhood is an excuse for failure and so we’ve become an unserious society. Victims are incapable of thinking about anything except themselves and our culture has become stuck in the same narcissistic loop of personalities. Everyone wants to be a celebrity, to feel special, and to play the victim when the social media collective fails to give them the due that they deserve.

The loudest voices are those who complain rather than inspire, who give up rather than get ahead, who explain that the game is rigged so everyone should join them in staying home.

Victims make a fetish of their pain. They are ‘in touch with their emotions’ because they inhabit them all the time. They are so busy selfishly feeling their feelings that they can’t be bothered to care about the impact on anyone else. Just as eskimos have many words for ‘snow’, victims have many ways to describe their pain. Their unhappiness is ‘trauma’, talking to people is ‘unpaid emotional labor’ and they spend all their time ‘processing’ or feeling their feelings.. Watching Netflix is ‘self-care’ to recover from all the ‘trauma’ of all their ‘unpaid emotional labor’.

Even their most ordinary activities are part of the fantastic drama that is their existence. Every breath they take is a labored ‘resistance’ to a vast systemic conspiracy out to destroy them.

And while such woke performative antics are more common among social media millennials than in everyday life, the underlying conviction that our emotions matter more than our responsibilities, that anger exempts us from morality, and truth takes a backseat to ‘my truth’ has spread throughout our culture with disastrous results on our functioning and our future.

A society is inspired by its leading figures and its culture is shaped by its stories. Victimhood has become our story. It pervades our classrooms, our fiction, our new myths and our discourse. It has left us in a state of arrested development because we have become incapable of moving forward. Instead of building new things, we rehash past history, purge ‘problematic’ figures and assign blame for the failures of the present to the dead history of the past.

Victimhood is obsessed with the past. Unlike survivors, victims never want to move forward. They want to remain tethered to the moments that defined them. America was always a nation that looked forward, that imagined the impossible and then realized it. Now, like many backward societies, it has become stuck in the past, rewriting its history to make its founding more evil, churning out excuses for today’s failures in the endless root causes for infinite victimhood.

No wonder most Americans, for the first time in history, no longer believe in a better future.

America was a nation of survivors. It can only endure as a nation that looks to the future. A nation of victims is doomed to fail. It fails because that is the only way its victims can succeed. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

Stupid Decisions Have Consequences.

Suffering is the beginning of wisdom

By Rich Kozlovich

I've always found it amazing that so many people who make incredibly stupid decisions, self-righteously, arrogantly and defiantly, demand those they ridiculed fix it for them when those decisions turn their lives into disasters!

What we have here is an ISIS Bride [who] Wanted to See Americans Killed, But Hey, Now She Misses Alabama, and she wants to come "home".   And we're supposed to think she should be allowed to return?  Her actions were so vile her citizenship was revoked, and by the Obama administration no less, but we're now expected to believe and accept the argument "she is a victim, and thus the red carpet should be rolled out for her."

Well....maybe the answer should be no?  Maybe she wants to return to Alabama, but does Alabama want her to return to Alabama, along with her young son.  Which makes one wonder if that young son is the cause for her repentance?  If that's so, and it probably is, that means she now wants to live in the nation she despised and shield her son from the very things she promoted?  Did I get that right?  Did I miss something? 

She says:

“If I need to sit in prison, and do my time, I will do it. … I won’t fight against it. I’m hoping my government looks at me as someone young at the time and naive.” 

 

My government?  Which government is that exactly?  She has no government.  She's not a citizen of any nation now as far as I can tell, but if she is, it isn't the United States government.  While she is a Muslim raised in America she claims she was young and naive.  But what the world saw was an absolutely vicious monster demanding that Muslims:

 

“Terrorize the kuffar [non-Muslims] at home.” And, “Men and women altogether. You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them. Veterans, Patriot, Memorial etc Day parades Kill them.”

 

“We have men (and women!) who love death as ardently as you love your lives! I was watching an American documentary on a battle in Afghanistan and the Americans are such cowards. Crying and shaking on the battlefield and saying, ‘our aim is to get everyone home where they belong.’ While our men’s aim on the battlefield is to reunite with our Lord. Our honor is in jihad, either victory or shahadah [Islamic martyrdom]. These men cry for their lives while we cry for our death (shahadah)!”

Now,  that isn't evidence of small dumb decision.  That's evidence of a massively huge stupid decision invoking mass murder of Americans who would be very real victims.  Victims of her vile and evil behavior.  

She whines she was misguided, brainwashed, and "the victim of a very sophisticated recruitment operation that focuses on taking advantage of the young, the vulnerable, the disenfranchised.” 

Disenfranchised?  

But she wasn't raised in a Muslim nation where women's rights are severely restricted.  She was a Muslim raised in America.  Okay, one might buy into the young and vulnerable emotional clabber, but in what way was she disenfranchised?   

Robert Spencer answers:

Was she barred from voting? Barred from holding certain jobs, or from entering certain areas? Was she a second-class citizen in some way? Of course not.

Now all that might work with leftists, who also hate America, and sane people may see a victim, but what sane people see is a victim of her own making and philosophy.  I don't want her sent to prison.  I don't want her to be "victimized" any further.  

I want her to stay in her chosen non-citizenship world and thoroughly enjoy the "freedoms" she chose for herself, and her little one. We all make stupid decisions in our lives, and most of them aren't all that consequential, with small consequences.   But stupid decisions involving murder are consequential, and the consequences should be severe.  

What's happened, or is happening to she and her son now, are not my fault, nor are they my responsibility.  And that goes for rest of sane America, and that's  not a lack of compassion! We all should feel great compassion for those who were murdered at her behest and their families, because they were legitimate victims.