Source: BIgstock

A nation is like a dysfunctional family. The confident elder son is his father’s favorite, fiercely resented by his insecure younger brother. Rivals in beauty and for male attention, the teenage sisters, though both stunners, have many vicious quarrels. The weary mother tries to endure her exacting mother-in-law, who never believed she was good enough for the woman’s son. The drink-loving uncle stays sober on holiday get-togethers, lest he should wind up drunk and get into it with everyone, especially with his cocky cousin, whose athletic glory, though thirty years past, he has never forgiven.

The dysfunctional family, we see, struggles to get along. The members require endless tact, forbearance, and forgiveness. What now makes the endeavor almost impossible is the media, whose motto is: “Let us encourage them to hate each other, the whites and the minorities, because it will make for a good show, and so be very profitable. Plus, we can affect a moral superiority all the while, and in our hearts congratulate ourselves for the division we have sown, for which we shall blame the victims themselves.”

So it happened a few years back that the media falsely depicted George Zimmerman as a white man, knowing that such a shameless appeal to cheap resentment would be sure to bring in the dollars. So too, whenever a police officer, of whatever race, kills a black man, the media never demonstrates any understanding of the extraordinary difficulties and inherently irrational challenges police face while trying to enforce law and order in singularly violent black America. There is so little effort to understand context because, like old ladies on their porches, the media is concerned to work up “a story.” So there is every effort to make blacks seem like innocent victims no matter what they have done. The point is to make it seem as if slavery never ended: The white master still exists; just look at his badge and gun.

Of course, immoral police do exist, and awful mistakes happen. Yet, of all the violent crimes that are committed, these persons and events make up a much smaller percentage than the media, with its appalling irresponsibility, would have us believe. Moreover, per national statistics, a police officer has a far greater chance of being killed by a black man than vice versa. Here, of course, one meets with the paranoid and delusional character of the leftist mind. “The statistics are doctored,” the leftist will say, also thinking implicit bias is the reason blacks are not keeping up with the rest of the races when it comes to success. There is no rational response to such a person. He is acting on faith, and therefore impregnable.

The media’s hypocrisy is galling. If the media really cared about black Americans, it would show some guts concerning that terrible social evil, black-on-black crime. It would provide the necessary admonishment: “When will you black men stop? Enough!” Instead, we get trite canters like President Obama, Michael Eric Dyson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who think poverty, lack of employment, and “the legacy of slavery” explain away crime and immoral conduct generally. Somehow nobody in the media and none of its beloved “public intellectuals” ever asks how it has happened that generations of poor Jews, Asians, Africans, and West Indians have not found that being “underprivileged” entails the elimination of individual agency. If the media really cared about black Americans, it would feature more figures like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, admirably honest and notably accomplished men who urge the black community to stop all the easy victimhood and take control of their lives.

Like sinners who never leave confession, the self-loathing media wants us all to despise America, and white people most of all. Income inequality, gender inequality, social justice, the school-to-prison pipeline, rape culture, the patriarchy—journalists and reporters, most of them badly educated and incapable of independent thought, throw around such clichés like kindergartners playing dodgeball at recess, and the game is rigged since white people are always hit. The media’s voguish bias against white people derives from what Harold Bloom has called the School of Resentment, a wretched collection of women, minorities, homosexuals, the sexually confused, the disabled—in short, anybody who feels that life has done him wrong: the more “inclusive” and “diverse” the party of complaint, the better. Highly influential on the media, the School of Resentment’s remedy for “injustice” is the hypocritical implication that white people—who, like everyone, are inheritors of contingencies with which they themselves had nothing to do—must be punished for being white. Justifying this desire to punish—a product of envy—is the actual purpose of “diversity,” which says, in effect: “White people bad; everybody else good.”

So it happens that every white patriot is interpreted to be a white nationalist, where “nationalist” is synonymous with “supremacist.” So all white history, be it Civil War monuments or the teaching of English literature, must be reformed, cleansed of the sin of whiteness. Clearly the actual racists here are the resenters themselves. And far from wanting people to be free, they intend to make us all permanent slaves to the past, which we can never move beyond, since they find that “correcting” the past is a kind of religious ritual; and all because they are too weak for self-reliance, too weak to forge a life worth living here and now. Stunted types as opposed to fully formed individuals, the diversity fundamentalists prefer playing petty word games to the hard work of becoming something better than what they are. So they invent trendy concepts such as “underprivileged,” an insidious, Orwellian term that falsely implies that privilege is a natural, common condition, like having arms and legs. This too is driven by sheer envy, and it is a symptom of modernity’s ongoing deprivation of human value, which produces a discontentment that must somehow be discharged. The Old Left, in a sense, was not all that far from the Old Right or true conservatism, since its primary value was moral, a decent life for all citizens. The New Left is a flight from life itself, whose harsh, tragic character cannot be accepted. The solution is to revise history and create a kind of perverse Christianity, rights and entitlements on the one hand, idols like diversity, implicit bias, and microaggressions on the other. Envy and the burning desire to punish drive it all.

Being an apocalyptic psychologist, I had long expected that some actual white supremacists—truly dangerous white nationalists, unlike the many white patriots who are falsely presented as such—would emerge in response to all this unwitting racism against white people. So it happened on Oct. 19 that three men—Colton Fears, 28, and William Fears, 30, both of Pasadena, Tex., and Tyler Tenbrink, 28, of Richmond, Tex.—were charged with attempted homicide after one of them shot into a crowd of protesters at Richard Spencer’s speech at the University of Florida. Such evil, to be sure, is playing right into the hands of Antifa, who have nationwide protests planned for Nov. 4, about a year after Donald Trump won the presidency. The point, says organizer Eva Sahana, is to “drive out the Trump and Pence fascist regime.”

Of course, there is no recognition that the “fascist regime” was elected by democratic process, because being fundamentally delusional, the leftist must assert that the Russians were involved, or that everyone who voted for President Trump is racist, sexist, or whatever (Martian interference, being disprovable, would also suffice). And why shouldn’t the leftist do so? After all, behind the guise of righteousness is the will to hate. Nor does anything realize a purpose like hatred: Nothing binds people together or compels them to act as effectively as hatred, which is powerfully sustained by pride.