Kanye had tripped over the same wire as [Peter] Thiel.

At some point minority political grievances transformed into minority political activism. And from there moved into just politics.

Claiming the existence of voting blocks along minority group lines benefits certain politicians looking for voter blocks. And it can benefit professional middlemen who present themselves as speaking for entire community in order to gain their own forms of preferment.

But this, is an exceptionally dangerous juncture. And one that each rights issue in turn has arrived at. It suggests, that you are only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances, political grievances, and resulting electoral platforms that other people have worked out for you.

Step outside of these lines and you are not a person with the same characteristics you had before but you have something differently from some prescribed norm. You have the characteristic taken away from you.

So Thiel, is no longer gay once he endorses Trump. Kanye West is no longer black, when he does the same thing.

This suggests black isn’t a skin color or a race. Or at least not these things alone. It suggest that black, like gay, is in fact a political ideology. This presumption goes so deep and is so rarely mentioned that is generally simply assumed.

Douglas Murray
September 17, 2019
The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

[I am extremely impressed with this book. Murray researches and explains, with great clarity, some of the things I have been calling mass delusion (see also here and here). Amazon describes the book as follows and with the diagnosis of “mass hysteria”. Perhaps that is a more correct phrase than I use:

In his devastating new book The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray examines the twenty-first century’s most divisive issues: sexuality, gender, technology and race. He reveals the astonishing new culture wars playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools and homes in the names of social justice, identity politics and intersectionality.

We are living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion and political ideology have collapsed. In their place have emerged a crusading desire to right perceived wrongs and a weaponization of identity, both accelerated by the new forms of social and news media. Narrow sets of interests now dominate the agenda as society becomes more and more tribal–and, as Murray shows, the casualties are mounting.

Readers of all political persuasions cannot afford to ignore Murray’s masterfully argued and fiercely provocative book, in which he seeks to inject some sense into the discussion around this generation’s most complicated issues. He ends with an impassioned call for free speech, shared common values and sanity in an age of mass hysteria.

Along the same lines as in the QOTD above he reviews Rachel Dolezal’s claim, and agreement by others on the political left, that she is black because she “identifies” as black even though she is of German and Czech heritage.

He describes some of the many ways Google search results demonstrate some sort of bizarre bias. For example, do an image search for “white couples”. About half of the results will be interracial. A image search for “black couples” shows something approaching 100% black couples. Similar results occur when doing image searches for “heterosexual couples” versus “gay couples”. This has to be deliberate. And to what end? It has to some sort of insanity.

He describes the 2017 protest at Evergreen College in far more detail than I had ever heard before. Amazing stuff. Over the top, unbelievably bat-shit crazy stuff. The things the students were saying and doing would have had me drawing my gun and, had I been unable to withdraw from the insanity, shot my way out of it. Those people were, and probably still are, living in an alternate universe that only has peripheral connections to ours.

Via his research and analysis I find myself hopeful that we will soon have a critical mass of people which will stop the tide of near insanity washing over us and some semblance of normality will be restored.

I expect that when such restoration occurs it will take far less time than what it did to get here. Perhaps only months as the delusion fades into obscurity. Also expect people who had once appeared to be in full alignment with the insanity claim, “I always had my doubts and never really believed it.”

It could be said these are the “crazy years” Heinlein spoke of in his books To Sail Beyond the Sunset (although this was in a different timeline than what you and I are traveling through).and in passing in Methuselah’s Children.

I just wish I was reading a science fiction or even psychological thriller novel rather than current news stories. But such books would never be successful. In order to be mostly believable fiction has to make sense.—Joe]