conspicuous crusading

Reaping Whirlwinds

By in conspicuous crusading, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Christopher Rufo:

Conservatives have recently scored surprise victories against left-wing corporate culture, with successful pressure campaigns against a trio of blue-chip companies—Disney, Target, and Bud Light—that have revealed the potential of a culture-war tactic once considered the Left’s stock-in-trade: the consumer boycott.

The campaigns are notable because they drew blood, figuratively speaking. Disney, which promised to embed radical gender theory in its children’s programming, watched its stock price plummet and signaled a retreat from the culture war. Target, which featured “breast binders” as part of its seasonal “Pride Collection,” saw a decline in sales and promised to “pause, adapt, and learn.” Bud Light featured a transgender “influencer” in an advertising campaign, sending its reputation and sales into freefall.

What lessons can be drawn from these examples? And how can conservatives use boycotts to fight left-wing cultural capture?

Helen Andrews, in her book Boomers, describing the tactics that brought Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to prominence:

Interestingly, if Breadbasket had tried these tactics only a few decades earlier, courts would have considered them illegal. Boycotts, except in limited circumstances, were considered unfair commercial interference, and victimized owners could sue organizers for damages. In a landmark case in 1934, the Harlem agitator Sufi Abdul Hamid, also known as Black Hitler for his vocal support for the Third Reich, launched a boycott against the A. S. Beck shoe store on 125th Street demanding that it hire more blacks on its sales staff. A New York judge ruled the picket unlawful, not because store patrons had been violently assaulted (though they had been), but because Hamid and his picketers had no connection to the store. If it had been a protest by black Beck’s employees demanding better treatment, that would have been a labor dispute and thus protected by the Norris-LaGuardia Act. But this was a​ conspiracy against a lawful business by a third party seeking to impose its political preferences. Even a peaceful boycott would have been illegal.

I was not aware of this. I thought tedious consumer boycotts led by political activists had always been with us, like death, taxes and the poor. I had so many futile arguments in my misspent youth against left-wing enthusiasts for boycotting. Oh, man, what I wouldn’t give to see the old lefty blogosphere prosecuted en masse for “conspiracy against a lawful business by a third party seeking to impose its political preferences.” Is this what the edgy kids mean when they say RETVRN?

But alas, as with free speech, I’m resigned to the idea that it will take people like Rufo leading a counter-revolution before we have any chance of finding our way back to the detente of old-fashioned liberal pluralism. I don’t like it, and I’ll never participate in it myself, but if I see my old liberal pals squealing in protest, I’ll be happy to remind them, in the words of Les Claypool, “I’m the one who told you “Told you so.”

The Preaching Will Continue Until Morale Improves

By in conspicuous crusading, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, world football No Comments

Douglas Murray:

There seemed little likelihood that they would put up with this new performative gesture going on not just once, but months and months after the event that kicked it off. Football grounds, even after decades of gentrification and rising ticket prices, are not always genteel places. They are places where strong views are held about peoples’ failings, real or otherwise, with crowds who do not always keep their opinions to themselves.

And so, as the months dragged on and the strange new ritual seemed impossible to shrug off, the day was always going to come when the clubs reacquainted themselves with their supporters. Sure enough, on Saturday that happened, and the inevitable, predictable thing took place, at the home of one of the less genteel of football clubs: Millwall. At the start of the match between the south London side and visitors Derby County, both teams went down on one knee as is now their custom — and as they did so, many of the supporters began audibly to boo.

So, yes — for those of you unacquainted with the world of English soccer, games have been going on since the leagues restarted over the summer, in empty stadiums. Throughout that time, it has become a new ritual for the players to take a knee for a moment in solidarity with BLM after the opening whistle. Only just this past weekend, tiny numbers of fans were allowed back in certain grounds. As the man said, the Millwall supporters made their feelings known about this new ritual of virtue-signaling. The feculent, inbred world of football journalism, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail, was united in its horrified denunciation of these savages who dare to show such impiety toward the new state religion. It was suggested somewhere that CCTV might even be used to identify the “offenders,” who are apparently deserving of punishment under new anti-blasphemy laws. I smirked and thought, “Good for them.”

Oh, I’m sure there are plenty of characters among the booing ruffians whom I would find loathsome (the same rule applies to pretty much any assemblage of five or more people). But for all I know, maybe many of them were booing at what could reasonably be seen as the unwelcome imposition of American political obsessions into English sport. I know if I were English, and even tepidly patriotic, I’d be thinking, “Why do we have to imitate whatever the stupid Yanks are doing?” Either way, the strident condemnation, the determination to crush even the smallest display of dissent, doesn’t give an impression of strength or confidence. It shows insecurity and weakness, a recognition that if anyone other than carefully-chosen media elites is allowed a voice, things could get out of hand in a hurry. Maybe there are racists among the jeering masses. But when the non-racists are a bunch of tongue-swallowing cowards, well, you take your heroes where you can find them.

Cleanup In Aisle Twelve

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, george carlin, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

I don’t believe there’s any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can’t completely ignore.

— George Carlin

Kevin D. Williamson:

More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.

…Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.

George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. But Kathleen Kingsbury — do I have to tell you she’s from Portland? she’s from Portland — has moved up a step at the New York Times, and promises not to publish any opinions someone might have an opinion about. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.

They always come for pop culture eventually. When I was an adolescent, the crusade du jour was about putting parental warning labels on records with “explicit content,” a worthless gesture intended to vaguely relieve the widespread anxiety caused by the complex problem of broken families and latchkey kids. I can’t help but recall that the effort was spearheaded by a well-off white woman, the wife of a soon-to-be Vice President. Today’s purgeoisie (credit to Neontaster for that coinage), confronted with intractable social ills, has risen to the challenge by disarming mass murderers like Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam, decolonizing the breakfast table, and using national newspapers as a platform to publicly humiliate private citizens for once wearing blackface, even when it was done in the spirit of parody against the earnest wearing of blackface. When we roll up our sleeves, there is no ambiguously-symbolic representation tangentially associated with something which could conceivably be construed as “bad” that we can’t dispose of in short order.

Sooner or Later You’ll Be a He-Man Woman-Hater

By in conspicuous crusading, gender, media/propaganda, non compos mentis, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Sometimes, you just have to admire the sheer brass ovaries.

Look, I’ve been alive and paying attention over the last decade or so. If there were any feminists publicly questioning or criticizing the increasingly-fanatical direction their crusade was taking, I somehow missed them. If there were any critics of the simple-minded slogans of intersectionality who were granted a respectful hearing by our media class, I somehow missed them. The only people who dared speak up were publicly canceled, in the parlance of our times, while being slandered as misogynist rape apologists doing the bidding of their right-wing paymasters (man, those guys are behind everything). If there were any clear guidelines about how to distinguish credible accusations from scurrilous ones, they were never publicly articulated. Talk of “due process,” however tentative, was considered a “dog-whistle” of the patriarchy.  Way back in 2014, Scott Alexander analyzed what was becoming an already-obvious compulsion among feminists to pick the absolute worst hills to die upon:

The enigma is complicated by the observation that it’s usually feminist activists who are most instrumental in taking these stories viral. It’s not some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists choosing the most dubious accusations in order to discredit public trust. It’s people specifically selecting these incidents as flagship cases for their campaign that rape victims need to be believed and trusted. So why are the most publicized cases so much more likely to be false than the almost-always-true average case?

What’s really amusing is that he probably thought “some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists” was such a perfect reductio ad absurdum that it might serve forever as a rhetorical guardrail, preventing anyone from plunging over the edge into lunacy. That guardrail only lasted, what, five and a half years before Ms. Faludi barreled through it in an eighteen-wheeler, all hopped up on the trucker’s speed of ideology and propaganda?

Now, like many aficionados of the human comedy, I have certainly enjoyed the recent spectacle of the scuttling of the good ship #MeToo in the name of political expediency. Your revolution is over, Faludi. Condolences. The broads will always lose. It’s like one of the Three Stooges with a bucket on his head; you can see it coming from far away, but it’s still funny to watch. In fact, I think I enjoy this reboot of the franchise even better than the original version starring Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and all those other ’90s stars.

But let’s be fair. Contrary to what some have claimed or implied, #MeToo was never a purely cynical exercise in political partisanship. After all, it did bring down a powerful Hollywood Democrat and a sitting Democratic senator. It just turns out that a presidential election is simply a bridge too far. No one is willing to chance losing to Trump again for the sake of principles. Suddenly, idealists see the attraction of lesser-evilism. If we were mature adults, we could talk about this. We could admit that part of the tragic nature of existence is the fact that we’re frequently forced by unchosen circumstances to sacrifice our principles to necessity. But we’re not mature adults, Linda Hirshman’s example to the contrary. We’d rather avoid the up-front pain of facing our compromises squarely and choose the no-money-down, balloon-payment option of investing far, far more time, effort, and pain into denying that there was ever a tragic conflict in the first place, let alone any chastening compromises. We’d rather descend into farce and blame an all-powerful cabal of our enemies for playing some incredibly disciplined long game to manipulate us into this situation so that we can pretend our moral virginity remains intact.

And for what? Who does this benefit? She and her comrades know full well what sort of message they were relentlessly pushing. Those “right-wingers,” real, honorary, and imagined, certainly remember. Absolutely no one is fooled by this, though some will find it useful to pretend to be fooled. And yet, some idealistic part of me is still shocked, no matter how often and predictably this happens, that people would rather go through more trouble to lie than to cut through all those tangled webs and just tell the truth. I can’t help but laugh at the irony that my own feeble idealism would survive after theirs had sold out.

Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn

By in conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions No Comments

James Lileks:

I think a lot of people who lived their lives in a quivering state of imminent ecological collapse-panic have moved those emotions from that box into this one, and feel energized because the dread now seems even more imminent, and they have Science! on their side, and their enemies are all the right enemies, and this time they can make a difference. And it requires nothing.

I’m not much of an aphorist, unfortunately, but I do have one saying that I thought up myself: “Beware the intersection of convenience and virtue.” Righteousness that asks little or nothing of you is cheap and dangerous like bathtub gin. And, as Theodore Dalrymple notes,“There is more pleasure in being right about forthcoming disaster than in being right about incremental improvement.” How quickly we seem to have forgotten all we learned back when “motivated reasoning” and “confirmation bias” were trendy topics.

Cry for the Indians

By in conspicuous crusading, jests japes jokes jollies, the cult of multi No Comments

Yes, but it makes a certain group of white people feel better about themselves, and as always, that’s all that matters.

…adding, oh, now that’s just funny:

Thank goodness there are so many concerned white people around who can explain to these poor savages how they should feel and think!

We’re Livin’ In a World of Fools Breakin’ Us Down When They All Should Let Us Be

By in conspicuous crusading, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Don Bodger:

Gallant can be heard on the video barking out instructions to make the big cat go away. “Get out of here.” “Bad kitty.” “Go on, get.” “I’ll fight you.”

But none of it worked so she pulled out the heavy artillery – the heavy metal version, at least.

“I quickly rifled through my iTunes and found Metallica ‘Don’t Tread On Me’,” she explained. “As soon as it started to play, he buggered off into the bush.

”I guess he didn’t want to eat anything that leaves a Metallica taste in his mouth,” Gallant joked.

I’m not sure if scolding an approaching cougar with “bad kitty!” is brave or oblivious, but never mind that. Reading this reminded me that “Don’t Tread On Me” was one of the filler songs on Metallica’s self-titled “Black Album,” which was released in August 1991, propelling them into the commercial stratosphere, where they still reside today. The lyrics were written about the Gadsden flag, which would become prominently associated with the Tea Party movement two decades later. When the album was first released, however, there was a bit of minor controversy around the song, as some Metallica fans assumed it was a jingoist anthem in support of the first Gulf War. Singer/guitarist James Hetfield angrily insisted that while he wasn’t, in fact, particularly opposed to the war, the lyrics had nothing to do with that; they were written in an objective, descriptive way about the flag itself, simply because he was interested in the origin and history of it.

This was a common assertion made by heavy metal bands of the time — mentioning something, or paying attention to something, was not the same as endorsing it. Bands like Slayer, for example, who wrote songs about gruesome topics like serial killers and the Holocaust, claimed to be doing a form of documentary history — not promoting, not denouncing, just observing and describing. Artists saw no moral obligation to editorialize about the subjects of their songs. Listeners were assumed to be mature enough to be capable of thinking and judging for themselves. A cynic could plausibly argue that the only thing the artists truly cared about was provoking controversy in order to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace and convert media attention into record sales, but nonetheless, it’s noteworthy that even a much-derided, lowest-common-denominator form of entertainment like metal music presumed a certain maturity among its audience. It was a more libertarian time.

But those sepia-tinted days are gone. We live in more patronizing times. Nowadays, it’s a given among professional thinkers that there is no such thing as true “objectivity.” It was only ever a fig leaf used to conceal the White Male Phallus of Power as it raped its way through history. To pose as a disinterested bystander is to abdicate one’s duty to line up on the Right Side of History alongside the oppressed, dispossessed and marginalized. If “Don’t Tread On Me” were written today or even covered by a young band, they might find themselves denounced and “cancelled,” even if the “backlash” consists of — literally — five anonymous obsessives on Twitter with nothing better to do. In fact, the only reason I knew about fans being angry about the song in 1991 was because Hetfield himself mentioned it in a magazine interview. He brought it up in order to dismiss it as ignorant nonsense, and his was the final word on the matter. Whatever became of those angry fans? Did they read Hetfield’s words, feel sheepish for a moment about jumping to conclusions, and go back to banging their heads to “Enter Sandman”? Did they trash all their Metallica CDs and t-shirts, complain to their friends, write a few angry letters to rock magazines that never got printed? Did they hold a grudge for a few years, making sure to loudly denounce Metallica as warmongering fascists whenever they heard the band mentioned, before eventually maturing and forgetting all about it? I don’t know, because, thankfully, there was no incentive then for media to shine a spotlight on such perpetually-aggrieved people, and there were no public platforms designed to cater to them and reward them for their histrionics. We didn’t know how good we had it.

What Else Could I Write? I Don’t Have the Right

By in conspicuous crusading, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Jesse Singal:

While the motivations of the movement for more diverse voices in young adult fiction is commendable—YA fiction, like many other areas of publishing, has its fair share of access problems with regard to class and race—the manifestation of this impulse on social media has been nothing short of cannibalistic. The Twitter community surrounding the genre, one in which authors, editors, agents, and adult readers and reviewers outnumber youthful readers, has become a cesspool of toxicity.

“Young-adult books are being targeted in intense social media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons—sometimes before anybody’s even read them,” Vulture’s Kat Rosenfield wrote in the definitive must-read piece on this strange and angry internet community. The call-outs, draggings, and pile-ons almost always involve claims that books are insensitive with regard to their treatment of some marginalized group, and the specific charges, as Rosenfield showed convincingly, often don’t seem to warrant the blowups they spark—when they make any sense at all.

It often seems like the web consists of nothing but dispiriting stories like this. You could set your watch by the tumbrils as they trundle past each day, carrying a new batch of thought-criminals to the guillotine. On the bright side, though, it’s been years since I’ve seen one of those insipid articles claiming that reading literature makes one a better person and contributes to moral progress. (Speaking of fiction, it would be nice if critics like Singal could stop pretending that the motivations are “commendable” and somehow unrelated to their utterly predictable manifestations, but I suppose that’s just my undying optimism shining through.)

Battle Lines Being Drawn?

By in conspicuous crusading, the statusphere No Comments

T. Greer:

Let’s be clear about what is happening here. When Wagner accuses Bari Weiss and company of writing their apology tweets and correction letters in order to signal thoughtfulness and moderation, she is excusing herself from any need to actually engage with Weiss et. al. The same is true for most of the “virtue signalling” critiques lobbed at the left: to label an argument a virtue signal is to discredit it without actually having to respond to it. Why would you respond to it? The signaler is not arguing, but maneuvering. Their words are not written in good faith. Their appeals to reason are merely a clever gloss for strategic, self-serving behavior. Reason is a vain pursuit in a world where all reasoning is a slave of narrow self-interest.

As a rhetorical strategy this is extremely effective. This is why we have seen it spread from the right’s ideological fringes, to the centerpiece of conservative critique, and now to leftist attacks on the center. But there are consequences for intellectual life dominated by a theory that no person’s words mean what they say they mean. When words have been reduced to a mask for status seeking, signalling worth, dog whistling, securing privileged interests, solidifying tribal identities, or what have you, then words have been reduced to mere tools in a competition for domination. It is foolish to think they will not be treated as such.

This is a good post. I’ve been chewing on it for a week now. And while it’s always useful to be reminded of the need to be charitable toward intellectual opponents, I’m not entirely convinced by his argument that accusations of “virtue-signaling” are equivalent to the Marxist notion of false consciousness and equally destructive to reasonable debate. Primarily, this is because, for Marx and his doctrinaire followers, class was an immutable, objective characteristic as determined by scientific analysis. Your interests as a bourgeois or a proletarian were defined by class identity, not personal choice or idiosyncrasy. The borders of identity, like the eventual physical borders of Marxist countries, were closed.

In contrast, virtue-signaling is about the effortless and cost-free demonstration of one’s place on the “right side of history.” It’s about individuals striving to keep up with an ever-changing definition of radical chic. The definition of chic is fluid, not fixed, and today’s cool kids are tomorrow’s lame embarrassments. As Kristian Niemietz observed, why does one pundit receive fawning praise for proudly proclaiming herself a communist on TV, while a student group is considered to have committed a faux pas by specifically praising Stalin’s Gulag? If a communist is a communist, how else can one explain this without recourse to the vagaries of fashion? What are people responding to if not the style in which the sentiment is expressed? To accuse Ash Sarkar of virtue-signaling isn’t to say that she “doesn’t truly believe” she’s a communist; it’s to accuse her of using the term aspirationally while not taking it seriously. She’s wrong for thinking that communism can somehow be separated from its history, and she’s contemptible for flirting with it, but no one is claiming that it’s objectively impossible for her to do so because she’s a media figure and not a factory worker.

The modern version of Marxist false consciousness appears in the form of identity politics, where your ideas and interests are assumed to be determined by your race, class, gender, etc., and you are treated as an interchangeable widget in a demographic category. Virtue-signaling, however, describes a frivolous space where ideas and words are little more than brand logos, separate from their real-world consequences. No personal epiphany or act of will could ever allow a bourgeois shopkeeper, let alone an aristocrat, to become a proletarian. No heterosexual white man can ever be truly woke, no matter how often he flagellates himself for his privilege. By contrast, accusations of virtue-signaling are intended to embarrass their targets into recognizing their hypocritical superficiality and changing their behavior. “Pardon me, but your social-climbing slip is showing.”

If Aristotle was correct that virtue is the mean between two vices, virtue-signaling denotes a lazy attempt to claim the benefits of virtue without doing the work or paying the costs. Russell Brand, the imbecilic British celebrity, is virtue-signaling when he writes a book advocating for some vaguely-defined revolution while giving interviews in which he melodramatically proclaims his willingness to die for the cause. He wants the gravitas of a savior or a martyr, but he isn’t about to seriously inconvenience himself to attain it. Should he actually move to Venezuela and become a guerrilla fighter in an attempt to preserve the dying embers of Chavismo, though, well, he would still be a contemptible idiot, but at least he couldn’t be accused of only caring about looking cool among his celebrity-entertainer peers.

To reiterate what I said years ago, to get any profitable use out of the term, I think it’s best to understand it as being specific to social media. As Greer notes, the behavior of trying to project and manipulate a certain image of oneself has always been around, but the thing we call “virtue-signaling” emerged from a specific context. It’s built on the recognition that social media has created a cultural space for the expression of opinion with a low barrier to entry. We thought talk was cheap until we invented tweeting. Now, any idiot with a smartphone can participate in a worldwide hashtag conversation. The value of having edgy political opinions has plummeted. How does one distinguish oneself in a flooded marketplace? As with all fashions, the distinctions will seem irrational to an outsider. Why is this hemline in but that one is out? Why is it cool to say “I’m literally a communist!” but gauche to say “Actually, the Gulag wasn’t that bad”? The distinction has to seem arbitrary; if it were logical and predictable, anybody could crack the code and appear cutting-edge. And the performance of virtue has to become more creative to stand out. Anybody can feel bad about injustice, but only a select few can wear that look well and receive praise for it.

Greer is concerned that when we lose the ability to argue under the assumption of your opponent’s good faith, we’re on a slippery slope to using force to resolve our differences. I do take the possibility seriously, but as I said, I’m skeptical that this is where we’re headed. I think that with social media, we’ve created a space for people to indulge en masse in fantasy. To me, Sayre’s Law describes the teacup-tempests of our social-media age — the rhetoric is so vicious because the stakes are so small. I don’t think that many people truly believe in the possibility of radical political change, let alone desire it. I think both the tiki-torch Nazis and the Antifa goons still expect their Amazon Prime deliveries to be waiting on the doorsteps of their suburban homes after they’re done brawling downtown. I don’t think any of the media figures caterwauling about fascism honestly expect to have secret police kicking in their doors. Everyone takes for granted the stability of the political system, which allows them to waste their time on romantic fantasies of redemptive violence and heroism. Lord knows there are plenty of pathologies to diagnose in the body politic, but I don’t think this particular concept is one of them.

Sentence First, Verdict Afterwards

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, race, world football 3 Comments

Mick Hume:

Instead, the Sterling affair has been blown up into a political football to be used in the favourite game of British snobs: giving all common football fans a kicking as racist thugs, sticking the boot into the tabloid press for allegedly stoking prejudice and violence, and demanding stricter policing of both. Behind all that lurks the fashionable belief that working-class Brexit supporters are a bigoted mob.

Cometh the hour, cometh the Spiked article about the snobbish Elites looking down upon the People with fear and contempt. Spiked, the stopped clock of online magazines, has found its twice-daily occasion to be correct. (It’s even more touching that Hume, a torch-carrying Trotskyist, should finally have the chance to be right about something for a change.) For those blissfully unaware, during the Chelsea/Manchester City match a couple weeks ago, the television cameras caught several Chelsea fans shouting abuse at City winger Raheem Sterling as he went behind the goal to retrieve the ball for a corner kick. Thousands of amateur lip-readers quickly formed a consensus that one fan in particular had called Sterling a “fucking black cunt.” (American readers may or may not be aware that the dreaded c-word doesn’t carry the same offensive gendered connotations among our British friends; the outrage was over the modifier.)

This sparked a great National Conversation about the specter of racism in football. The Daily Mail, which never saw a barrel-bottom it wouldn’t lick for clicks, helpfully published the scoundrel’s name, age, and address, with a bonus picture of his house, no doubt to facilitate healing conversations between him and well-wishers in the community, and later gleefully snickered at his “having a moan” over losing both his job and lifelong season tickets. The Guardian, which responds to a hint of social injustice the way a flaccid male member responds to a dose of Viagra, temporarily eased its attempts to proselytize for women’s football in order to testify to the omnipresent menace of racism. Nike, fresh from sponsoring Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling rebellion, quickly bolstered its own woke credibility by producing an ad with Sterling. The media spotlight attracted plenty of other people looking to insert themselves into the story somehow. Inevitably, we were reminded that racism is always and forever everywhere, even, or especially, when it doesn’t seem to be anywhere.

Lost in all the furor and soul-searching was the villain’s insistence that he had called Sterling a cunt of the Manc variety, not the black one. (I assume residents of Manchester don’t yet qualify as a protected species under hate-crime laws.) There seems to be a question-begging circularity to the whole spectacle — how do we know he didn’t, in fact, say “Manc” instead of “black”? The shape of one’s mouth appears plausibly similar in both instances, and unless Britain’s CCTV surveillance has gotten even more quasi-totalitarian in recent years, I’m pretty sure we don’t have conclusive video analysis of how, precisely, the blackguard’s tongue was pressed to his teeth in order to form his consonants. The answer seems to be, well, wouldn’t you expect a racist to feign innocence like that? A cynic might suspect that we’ve invested too much in the story to have it all fizzle out over something as prosaic as the facts, so even if it’s not literally true in this instance, it’s generally true that there are racists out there who would say such things, so we should testify to that higher truth anyway. Besides, who would say that there’s anything wrong with a mass revival denouncing racism? I think you know who.

All in all, there’s no redeeming moral to the story. It’s just a sordid spectacle that makes a misanthrope out of the observer. But yes, when the man’s right, the man’s right. This was largely a solidarity-building exercise for a familiar type of pious liberal for whom the threat of racism would have to be invented if it couldn’t be found already existing. Like war games on the cultural level, it’s an opportunity to rehearse maneuvers and test weaponry. But if there’s one thing British sports journalists love more than sermonizing, it’s reveling in drama surrounding Jose Mourinho, and a merciful God delivered just that opportunity this week by having Mourinho finally get fired as Manchester United manager, thus sparing us from further ritual penance.

1 2 3 4›»