New taboos

Daniel Greenfield has a few thoughts on the racism industry.

Racism is the new sex for a creed of politically correct puritans who are obsessed with a new kind of prurience. As the last sexual taboos fall by the wayside, the new taboos are political and the new witch hunts are all about exposing hidden reservoirs of bigotry among celebrity chefs and lurking White Hispanic menaces.

The graduate of a modern liberal arts university receives training in spotting and identifying the most obscure forms of bigotry. He isn't taught to spot burning crosses, but to denounce implicit narrative privilege. The microscope that he wields to spot the most obscure forms of bigotry imaginable doesn't really detect bigotry, it manufactures it. It crafts his higher moral ground by exposing the wrongdoing of everyone and everything else.

His or her contemporaries have few skills, except the familiar one from every totalitarian state of denouncing enemies of the state for some trivial act. Having been turned into inquisitioners by an educational system that is terrible at producing engineers or scientists, but spectacular at producing politically correct policemen of public spaces, they might as well inquisition.

The new frontier of bigotry is gay rights and there will be plenty of power and fear to be gained from the next wave of lawsuits, firings, boycotts and morality mobs.

The United States no longer leads the world in space or in many areas of science and technology. Its literature has become forgettable and the great skyscrapers are being built in Asia and the Middle East. But it leads the world in racial hysteria, an obsession as irrational as the satanic sex abuse kindergartens and the witch trials. We can't go back to the moon, but our social engineers stalk the corridors of power with microscopes that claim to peer into the human heart.

Speaking of gay rights, I overheard parts of a conversation yesterday between two women. It began with one asking the other, "How's your wife?" I'll admit I was taken aback.