Great piece by Christian Alejandro Gonzalez at NRO on what he rightly calls "a highly inane interpretation of history -- an interpretation that one might call the White Male Theory of History, or WMTH for short":
As with other pathological political movements and ideas (e.g., support for government censorship, or loathing of liberal democracy), the WTMH comes in rightist and leftist variants.
...What both the Right and the Left White Male Theories of History share is the fundamental assumption that the telling of history must monomaniacally focus on the actions of white men -- an identity category that is silently assumed to have always existed, but which is in reality a recent concoction. (Homer and Plato were not "white men" in the same way that Donald Trump is a white man.) In the Right WMTH, white men are held to be the epitome of science and progress and glory; in the Left WMTH, they are presented as oppressors, enslavers, and colonizers. In both versions, groups other than whites are assumed to have had little to no agency to decide their future for themselves, whether for good or ill; and even today, they still don't. In both versions, the world's peoples are divided into ludicrous binaries: civilizer vs. barbarian on the right, oppressor vs. victim on the left. In both versions, the cleavages that divided men with white skin are dismissed as unimportant; distinctions in class, nation, ideology, and religion are systematically ignored. For the proponents of the White Male Theory of History, there is whiteness, and there is maleness, and such nuisances as the subtleties of history do not much matter....The influence of the WMTH can be most clearly seen in the debate over the record of "Western civilization." The loudest and most obnoxious voices in that debate tend to be rightists and leftists who subscribe to their side's respective version of the WMTH, invariably conflating the history of the West with the history of "white" people. In both cases, historical illiteracy replaces sober thought.For instance, when Congressman Steve King, Stefan Molyneux, and Faith Goldy hide their white-nationalist prejudices by rattling on about the importance of "defending Western values," they ignore that much of what makes the West great is precisely its efforts, however imperfect, to abandon tribal bigotry and extend legal rights and protections to people who are not white -- an achievement that the Steve Kings of the world rarely trumpet, and that if anything probably oppose. The irony of racists' and sexists' championing a culture that has sought to emancipate minorities and women is, of course, lost on such people.In a homologous fashion, the leftists who chant that "Western Civ has got to go!" do so because they equate Western values and history with white oppression, thereby neglecting to acknowledge that their demand for political equality and individual dignity for minorities was itself influenced by a Western (not "white") heritage that produced theories of legal, political, and social equality. William F. Buckley made a related point convincingly in his famous debate with James Baldwin. As he put it, "anyone who argued that English civilization ought to have been jettisoned because Catholics were not allowed to vote as late as 1829 and Jews not until 1832 should consider the other possibility. Precisely the reason why they did get the right to vote was because English civilization was not jettisoned." Buckley reached the conclusion that we should not "rush forward to overthrow our civilization because we don't live up to our high ideals.
via @Gurdur
I would suggest that Trump knows that there are people who matter that do NOT have Twitter accounts - that matter a LOT.
> not you, right?
> generally negative response to
> Trump tweets and the enthusiasm
> for AOC's?
*Sorry for the redundancy.> and declare it real.
- Never said you did.
- You don't need one to read his tweets.
- He's got x,000,000,000 followers no less adoring of him than you are who track him assiduously; that you might not in no wat excuses you from their pathetic rank.
- *HE* obviously relies on his Twitter account and the preeminent instrument of his communication with his zombies.
- If everyone was as thoughtful in composing a timeline and massaging its borders as am I, their lives would be no less enriched than my own, which would a remarkable blessing to conscious thought on a planet of the simple-minded.
- Do you think others go through life looking for "content"?
Perhaps most quintessentially: Do you worry a lot about being perceived as "common"?