Scott’s latest article, LOOKING A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH, is going massively viral with over 500 comments in just the past 16 or so hours, most in agreement.
The fact that even those on the ‘left’ like Scott are voicing dissent about social justice is further evidence we are winning, or at least the pendulum has swung the other way.
I think that is the problem. When creepy white supremacists criticize social justice, they’re at no risk of taking over the wider SJ-critical movement. As the old saying goes, white supremacists are the best argument against white supremacy, and most of them couldn’t take over a blanket fort with a flamethrower. But rhetorically-gifted Yale professors who get thinkpieces published in The Atlantic are exactly the sort of people who would take over the wider SJ-critical movement, become its most important voice, and define what it means both to the rest of the world and to its own members.
Or just look at Reddit, where I visit to take the pulse of the commentariat. On Reddit and 4chan, for example, I definitely perceive a SJW backlash since 2013 or so, with the disintegration of the OWS/’we are the 99%’ movement. Social media provides a platform for these dissenting voices that until recently were drowned out. The social justice movement overplayed its hand when it began its witch-hunts of the innocent (Justine Sacco, Matt Taylor (shirtstorm), Tim Wolfe, Brendan Eich firing, Donglegate, and many more) and suppression of the free-flow of information through blacklisting and forced resignations of public intellectuals (Tim Hunt, Larry Summers, Jason Richwine), as well as the whole ‘check your privilege’ campaigns. ‘Social justice’ went from ‘save the whales’ and ‘free Tibet’ to ‘let’s get this guy fired for noticing gender differences’.
Liberals, like their Puritan predecessors, believe in the myth of equality. For the left, their scriptures say that the economy will be doomed because of too much wealth inequality (or, in the case of the Puritans, eternal damnation). The Puritans believed everyone was born sinful; similarly, today’s liberals believe that everyone is born equal (blank slate), but instead of Church and God it’s the role of the state ‘save’ people so that equal outcomes are attained. Both reject the idea anyone is born ‘better’ than others.
But more and more people, young people in their 20’s and 30’s, especially, are waking up to the fact that the left’s Puritanical vision of reality is, ultimately, wrong, or, at the very least, in disagreement with empirical and biological reality. Why are people falling behind? The left says because we’re not spending enough taxpayer money. Yet, entitlement spending is at record highs. Billions of dollars every year on schools, welfare, and other programs. Maybe biological factors are to blame that render the left’s efforts futile. Maybe ‘greedy’ corporations and rich people are not the problem, maybe it’s low IQs and bad life choices (from not being smart enough to make good choices). We can keep blaming the economy as the left always does or, instead, accept the reality that at the biological level not everyone is equal, so we should not expect equal outcomes, which means there will always be some who have more and others who have less. And people who are well-versed in science and economics (as many millennials are) understand this, that survival-of-the-fittest model that applies in nature also applies, to some extent, in the real world.
Third, to many millennials, being smart and rich (with a detached ‘aloofness’) like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg is cool, as opposed to being a whiny poor liberal loser who always sees imagined injustices. The success of Silicon Valley and American capitalism is proving the left wrong, over and over again. There are companies right now that are worth billions that just three or four years ago didn’t exist. Coders out of college are making six-figures at start-ups, yet the left says the economy is weak and capitalism is dead. Coding, math, ..(STEM culture)..is the celebration of intellectualism, individualism, and wealth creation, in repudiation of decades of political correctness.
Efficiency (both in the workplace and in the financial markets), merit (some people being better than others, and thus being rewarded with more money and status), and technology (Facebook, Snapchat, apps, Tesla, Uber, Amazon, web 2.0, Silicon Valley) rule the world, making ‘social justice’ obsolete, sorry liberals.
Related: The SJW Narrative Collapse