Fear in Politics
The unspoken motive.
For all of their (ultimately irreconcilable) differences, the world’s wisdom traditions are of one mind in their insistence that most people prefer UnReality to Reality, the Lie to the Truth.
They also concur that it is, at bottom, fear that motivates the masses that have been exposed to the worldview embodied in their traditions to repudiate those worldviews.
Things haven’t changed. Today, it is fear—raw, primal, fear—that is the engine powering the capitulation of Americans, white and black, to the Big Lie, this whopper of a lie, that black Americans are perpetually murdered by a “White Supremacist” society via the police.
Such is the magnitude of this lie that it is no exaggeration to say that it is a parallel universe.
I have no interest at this juncture in elaborating upon the facts, long documented by scholars black, white, and other, regarding the social dysfunction endemic in the black community (that 50 or so years on since the Moynihan Report made its “call” for “National Action” has only increased exponentially); the staggering amount of black criminality; the astronomical rates of black-on-black, black-on-white, black-on-Hispanic, and black-on-Asian crime and violence; the infinitesimal likelihood of any random person, of any racial background, being brutalized by police in America; the higher likelihood of black suspects being shot by black police officers than by white officers; and the higher likelihood of white unarmed criminal suspects being shot by police than black unarmed criminal suspects being so shot.
These realities, the grisly details of which no one who is remotely familiar with them, least of all law-abiding black citizens of little means who are essentially held hostage by the criminals who run their inner city neighborhoods, frighten people of all races, including blacks, some 80% of whom flee from the ghetto as quickly as they can once they obtain the resources to do so.
The role of fear in our politics, particularly our racial politics, is seldom mentioned by commentators. I suspect that this is in large measure because it is exceedingly difficult for people, especially men, to reckon with their own fears. At no time is this more challenging for a man than when it is physical violence, specifically, the fear of being physically dominated by other men that possesses him.
And when the object of the fear of the Racially Correct—men and women, black and white (and other)—is the underclass or lower class black, it is all but impossible to come to terms with it.
This denial, though, doesn’t obviate the fear. It only exacerbates it while miring the fearful ever deeper in his (or her) self-delusion. In and of itself, this is a private matter for folks to address on their own. But since the refusal of these fearful people to address their fears has resulted in disaster for American society as a whole, the fearful, and their fears, need to be called out and exposed for who and what they are.
To be clear, the fear to which I’m referring here is ultimately a fear of violence of the kind that has been on display in cities throughout the country over the last couple of weeks and that, despite an undoubted role played by white Antifa members, has been perpetrated predominantly by black criminals.
There has been much ink spilt over the decades on “white guilt.” Little, if any, has been spent on the subject of white fear—which, I’m contending here, is what lies beneath the veneer of whatever guilt may or may not exist.
The moral posturing of whites, particularly white liberals, that extends back decades and which has sunk to heretofore unplumbed depths in recent weeks is not, as conservatives are wont to label it, “virtue-signaling.” It is vice-signaling. The repulsive spectacle of whites kneeling before blacks and “atoning” for their “white privilege” highlights the most toxic of character defects on the part of the white penitents: obsequiousness, folly, impiety, idolatry, and, most fundamentally, cowardice.
These whites and a good number of others, in their heart of hearts, fear the black thugs that, long before anyone ever heard of the name of George Floyd, have reduced their neighborhoods and cities to hellholes. Such is their horror over those who have preyed upon people of all racial backgrounds, including and especially the law-abiding black citizens of modest means who are forced to live among them, whites who are now genuflecting at the altar of Blackism are, essentially, pleading to be spared from this violence.
I am not like those other, evil whites.
Don’t hurt me.
It is to this, and nothing more or less, to which the public confessions and acts of contrition on the part of whites boils down. They are veiled expressions of fear of, and subtle pleas to be spared from, the sort of violence and mayhem that largely black mobs have been raining down upon cities across the land.
The black middle and upper classes, specifically black celebrities and other elites who engage in their own share of vice-signaling, sparing no occasion to prove their “racial authenticity” by expressing “solidarity” with the Cause, are as well motivated, in the final analysis, by the same fear that animates their white counterparts.
Jesse Jackson, in an unguarded moment of candor that the Racism-Industrial-Complex pretends never happened after its attempts to explain it away proved unconvincing, expressed this fear shared by both blacks and whites when, way back in 1993, he said:
“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then [I] look around and see someone white and feel relieved.”
That it is, fundamentally, fear of the black underclass that lay behind the vice-signaling of the Racially-Correct of all races is a thesis that is far simpler, and more easily provable, than any and all competitors. Consider only this:
White and black apologists for black criminality and thuggery reveal through the choices they make virtually all day and everyday exactly what it is that they truly value. And, since these choices as to where they live, work, educate themselves, date, marry, raise their children, seek entertainment, and spend their money invariably seem designed to steer them as far away from black ghettos as possible, the honest observer has no option but to conclude that these choices are made from fear.
As the black scholar Thomas Sowell was quick to remind readers, people vote with their feet.
To put it another way, you know a person by what he or she does. Actions speak louder than words.
There is another consideration that strengthens my thesis further:
For all of their outrage over “white racism,” neither their apologists nor for that matter black thugs themselves have ever showed the slightest inclination to lead a Black Lives Matter, Antifa, or any other kind of “anti-racism” demonstration, much less a riot, through certain Hispanic neighborhoods.
Even the Southern Poverty Law Center has conceded that Hispanic or “Latino” gang members have been waging a campaign of, in their words, “ethnic cleansing” vis-à-vis blacks in places like Los Angeles from at least the 1990s. The many beatings, shootings, and killings to which blacks—and not black gangbangers or criminals, but law-abiding black residents—have been victim at the hands of Hispanic criminals have all been explicitly, unabashedly racial.
No BLM rallies or demonstrations, much less looting, arson, and vandalism courtesy of “anti-racists” have occurred in these parts of LA.
And just recently, as black crusaders for Social Justice and their white Antifa accomplices caused who knows how many millions of dollars of damage in Chicago, what few black looters dared to enter the Little Village neighborhood were soon chased out of it.
The gangbangers organized “checkpoints.” They would stop black motorists and demand that they identify themselves. If they were feeling merciful, the Hispanics would order these blacks, even if they lived in the neighborhood, to go into their homes and stay inside. More often, they would chase them or attempt to pull them out of their automobiles. Hispanic gang members would chase down blacks fleeing in their cars, smashing their trucks into them so that they couldn’t escape.
One video posted subsequently features a meeting between black and Hispanic Chicago gang members. Apparently, they arrived at a resolution of some sort, but the Hispanics could be heard saying things like, “If you do it, why can’t we?” and then chanting, “All lives matter!”
When locals in Chicago media and on social media referred to their “racism,” they merely replied that they were simply protecting their neighborhood. And that was the end of that. Why? The answer should be obvious: any more badgering would fall on deaf ears. It would not only carry zero weight; it could be of negative value—to the accuser. These Hispanic gangbangers, any zealot “anti-racists” already know, could be sure to respond to these taunts with the same brutality that they already demonstrated.
Meanwhile, the bands of armed white citizens in cities and suburbs around the country who managed to deter the domestic terrorists while actually harming no one are smeared by leftists online and in Big Media as “vigilantes” or “white supremacists.”
There is much more that can and will be said in the future on the woefully neglected role of fear in our nation’s politics.
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