Heather Mac Donald:

The possibility that Larry Elder may win California’s recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist Left. Elder’s foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card. Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state senator Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.

Another day, another step closer to reality melding with the Onion and/or a Chappelle’s Show skit.

One of the contractors at work is a white supremacist. He drives a Chevy HD dually truck with “Farm Use” license plates, listens to country music while working, and wears shirts that say “Black Votes Matter: Trump 2020.” Yes, he’s also a black guy, and his father runs a home for troubled youths, but he is still a white supremacist, because obviously, as a progressive philosopher once mused, it all depends on the meaning of “is.” Some of you no doubt think something as trivial as his race can acquit him of charges of white supremacy. What you fail to understand is that the definition of the term no longer depends on such real-world referents as skin color, heritage, or even objective reality. Everything is interior now; haven’t you heard? Kant’s basic idea, that our experience of the world primarily takes place inside our heads rather than “out there,” escaped from the dense thickets of his impenetrable prose into the hands of callow undergraduates, with predictable results. Whether you’re a man or woman depends on your mood in that moment; our progressive political class has come to hold this “truth” as self-evident. In a similar way, the updated definition of “racism” is “anything that offends the capricious racial sensibilities of white progs.” PoCs who refuse to acknowledge their place in the Great Chain of Political Being as wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democratic party are top of that list. Of course Larry Elder offends white progs, who, when you think about it, are the real victims here, as they usually are. Thankfully, their selfless dedication to making the world a better place outweighs the justifiable sense of grievance they carry due to how often the ungrateful subjects of their magnanimity keep disappointing them.