Apparently it isn’t racist to be racist if it’s against the right race.
It’s official: These are the United States of Double Standards.
For the latest proof, look no further than the controversy embroiling Twitter and America’s disgraced, so-called Paper of Record.
Conservative activist Candace Owens of Turning Point USA was banned, albeit briefly, from Twitter on Sunday. Her sin? She critiqued a number of breathtakingly racist Twitter comments from Sarah Jeong, the Gray Lady’s recently hired editorial-page writer. Owens illustrated how jaw-droppingly bigoted Jeong’s comments were by substituting “black” and “Jewish” for “white” — e.g., “Jewish people are bulls*** . . . like dogs pissing on fire hydrants. #cancelJewishpeople. Are Jewish people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun?” [Editor’s note: National Review’s policy is to replace some letters in indecent words with asterisks, but in the original versions of all the Twitter posts in this article, the words were spelled out.]
Owens’s argument by analogy was a perfectly appropriate rhetorical device, especially since she explained this technique in her post: “The above statements are from @nytimes editor @sarahjeong. I simply swapped out the word ‘white’ for ‘Jewish.’”
For this, Twitter closed Owens’s account, although it later reversed course after a backlash erupted.
Now, compare Twitter’s abuse of Owens to its hands-off treatment of Jeong.
Jeong’s amazingly racist, anti-white Twitter posts, going back to at least July 2014, never were banned, nor was she ever knocked off of Twitter. Never mind the bigoted bile that she spewed for more than four years:
• “Dumbass f***ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants”
• White people exude “a weird dog smell when it rains.” This was not an offhand remark that Jeong thoughtlessly transmitted; in fact, she provided a chart to illustrate this alleged olfactory phenomenon.
• “f*** white women lol.”
• “White men are bulls***.”
• “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” So Jeong is an ageist, too.
• “White people have stopped breeding. You’ll all go extinct soon. That was my plan all along.”
• “#CancelWhitePeople”
It is inconceivable that the Eighth Avenue Font of Left-Wing Orthodoxy would hire anyone who wrote “Kill more women.” And yet Jeong declared via Twitter in 2014: “Kill more men.” In 2015, she sped beyond mere misandry and actually advocated anti-male gendercide: “kill all the men.” If you are reading this while male, Jeong has YOU in her crosshairs.
Jeong claims that she simply was “counter-trolling” people on Twitter who attacked her for being of Asian heritage. Yes, some of these comments were ugly, such as this one: “Shut the f*** up you dog eating gook.”
Yikes!
Jeong could have followed Michelle Obama’s oft-quoted, widely rejected advice to her fellow leftists: “When they go low, we go high.”
Jeong could have rejected the racist cracks lobbed at her and slammed by name the bigots behind them. This would have exposed these creeps and served them their richly deserved opprobrium.
Jeong also could have limited her vicious comments to those specific individuals who targeted her. Jeong would have been on less shaky ground if she had written something like: “No, Bob. I don’t eat dogs. Do you survive on Wonder Bread alone, you stupid cracker?” Yup, racially inflammatory, but directed solely at Bob, the bigot.
Instead of handling things any of these ways, Jeong repeatedly condemned an entire race, just for the color of their skin. This is the dictionary definition of Jim Crow–era racial prejudice.
And yet, despite more than four years of such unbridled bigotry, Jeong was not marginalized. Rather, she scored a plum job on the editorial page of one of the planet’s most liberal and influential news organizations.
Jeong got her job offer even despite her obnoxious comments about several of her new male colleagues:
- “Guys, what drugs do you think [Paul] Krugman does”
- “[David] Brooks is an absolute nitwit too”
- And let’s not forget this lightly veiled death wish: “A just god would not allow Tom Friedman to keep talking.”
Once all of this went public — even after what her employers call “a thorough vetting process” including “a review of her social media history” — Jeong’s new bosses neither sacked nor denounced her. Instead, the Gray Lady coughed: “We hired Sarah Jeong because of the exceptional work she has done” and added that they are “confident that she will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward.”
So, rather than cower in shame beneath her desk, as she should, Jeong now stands atop one of the world’s highest-profile media platforms, from which she can spout her unfiltered, venomous hate.
Contrast Jeong’s case with that of libertarian technology writer Quinn Norton, once hired for a similar position with this same repugnant rag. Via Twitter, she referred to the racist comments of others, although these were not her own words. She also penned a piece about the importance of engaging one’s racist relatives in dialogue, rather than isolating them.
“The problem has always been white silence,” Norton wrote for Medium last November 21. “When you have racist friends and family, your silence enables and perpetuates their racism and the harm it does in the world,” she continued. “The work white people need to do right now is sitting with, and engaging with, the racists who care about what we think. We need to stay on the case. Tell them we care, that we love them, but never ever stop bringing it up. . . . That is the most direct and immediate way white people fight white racism.”
In other words, as the Left loves to say, start a conversation.
Norton’s supervisors at the Gray Lady disagreed.
“Despite our review of Quinn Norton’s work and our conversations with her previous employers, this was new information to us,” their statement explained. “Based on it, we’ve decided to go our separate ways.”
And consider Roseanne Barr. She foolishly jumped on Twitter (her first mistake) and described former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett as the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes. Nasty stuff, although it concerned one woman, not a whole race of people. Regardless, Barr should have kept this to herself.
But look what happened to her: ABC canceled her hit TV series.
There are two morals to this story. First, the Left relies on double standards the way cars run on gasoline. Second, racism is now totally cool with America’s liberals, as long as the bigotry is anti-white.