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Tuesday, December 03, 2013

Manufacturing Intolerance

By now everyone knows that Dayna Morales, the lesbian waitress who claimed to have been denied a tip over her sexual orientation, was lying. It’s not the first politically correct receipt hoax and it won’t be the last.

Morales’ hoax is a blip in the larger pattern of faked hate crimes. Bigotry is the witch hunt of the modern Salem and progressive witch hunters are just as careless about facts and evidence. Now as then, the goal is to stamp out an attitude and a cultural threat, rather than to enforce the law, and that leads inevitably to the entire tawdry parade of hysterical denunciations and moral panic.

But what is behind this need to manufacture intolerance? When your only real identity is the hatred of others then it is that hatred which keeps you going. An identity built around victimhood needs constant fresh injections of oppression to sustain its existence.

Those African-Americans who define “blackness” not in terms of positive values but in terms of negative values, need white racism to remind them of who they are. And the same holds true for other oppressed minorities who define themselves not by their values; but by their resentments.

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