You Are Here
It’s Always About Power
The hypocrisy is the point
A favorite pastime of liberal Twitter is to point out hypocrisies and double standards on the right. “You’re mad when Twitter restricts free speech,” someone might tweet to several thousand likes, “but you celebrate when a baker is allowed to deny service to gay couples.” “You claim to hate government handouts, but you began your business with a government loan.” Or my personal favorite, “If those people were Black, police wouldn’t have allowed them to…”
Yeah. No shit.
I’ve engaged in this too. Who doesn’t love being right, calling someone on their bullshit? But the farther along we get on the nightmare ride of Viral Content America, the more materially useless this practice seems to me. The problem I have with the fetish for pointing out intellectual inconsistencies in the actions of White supremacists, bigots, race-baiters, and fascists is that it still relies on an idea that should have been abandoned long ago by anyone who is genuinely about liberation—namely, that the people who willingly engage in systemic oppressions would stop if they just understood what they were doing.
This hope is both wrong and childish. It assumes that the only thing standing between these people and basic humanist, nonoppressive behavior is proper…
