Wilhoit’s Law is the rule that the basic principle of conservatism is “the law protects us but doesn’t bind us; the law binds you but doesn’t protect you.”
Case in point, WaPo columnist Karen Attiah was recently fired for — well, being black and liberal but officially, as hilzoy says, for posting things like this:
As Hilzoy says, that’s accurate and it’s not objectionable. And it brings up the way in which the media so often look at white psychos and rapists and discuss how this nice white dude wound up doing something bad while POC get the “he was no angel” treatment. Or how the NYT paints Russell Voight, authoritarian Trumper as a thoughtful small-government type of dude rather than a radical extremist (As Democracy Americana puts it “to Russell Vought, it is the prerogative of people who look like him and share his sensibilities to define the boundaries of who gets to belong, to have their own image reflected back at them in the public square.”)
Or consider this post from Fred Clark about the twisted view many right-wingers have of justice and oppression: “Everybody understands “justice” when they’re the one who didn’t get a cookie. Even Trump and his MAGA followers get that. But if some “social justice warrior” points out that someone else is being denied a cookie and says, “That’s not fair,” this confounds and confuses them. So what? That person is not me. So that’s not a matter of justice, merely of “social justice,” and that’s just some sin-of-empathy, woke-mind-virus, cultural Marxism argle bargle.
And since they cannot comprehend justice for other people, they cannot comprehend the enormous moral authority of appeals to justice and of condemnations of injustice. The power and eloquence of King or Douglass or Baldwin sounds, to them, like mere noise — sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. They dimly grasp that this justice and injustice business seems compelling to other people in a way that threatens their grasp on power, but they cannot perceive why or how that is the case.”
(Their lack of comprehension is very Screwtape)
And so they try to mimic the noise Bari Weiss has built her career on insisting successful rightwing pundits are the wretched of the Earth, their careers destroyed by cancel culture/political correctness/social justice warriors/etc. That they’re rich, prominent and have huge followings doesn’t matter when they’ve been criticized! Now she’s going to take over CBS news (more thoughts on that and her here, here and here).
It’s like the anti-antiracists who claim, in the words of Paul Waldman, that“we must stop talking and thinking about racism, and most of all we must stop trying to do anything about racism … It allows people to claim a commitment to equality while opposing policies meant to achieve actual equality. It enables them to proclaim their own victimhood, which has become absolutely central to the conservative worldview.”
A few years back on Love, Joy Feminism, Libby Anne commented that the unmarked police vans snatching protesters in Portland off the street were exactly the End Times scenario her childhood fundamentalist church taught her to anticipate — yet in that scenario, Christians were the victims, not cheering the government on. Likewise, Republicans spent the Obama years screaming about how at any second the tyrant government was going to force all Real Americans into concentration camps. Look at Republicans now.
It doesn’t matter that Republicans salivate at the thought of stripping away women’s rights, gay rights, POC rights and the rights of anyone to disagree. Like Attiah says, we’re still expected to be civil and nice to them. Apple has declared ICE agents a protected class, meaning that apps for monitoring or tracking ICE aren’t allowed in the Apple store. “Concentration Camp” Kristi Noem and other Republicans are melting down because a country singer made an anti-ICE song — how dare he mock them! Jesse Watters of Fox is equally aghast A-OC would mock Stephen Miller. They have the right to punch down and look down at us; we should suck it up and take it.
As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò says in Boston Review, giving them what they want — refusing to shame or condemn them — is a mistake: “Common decency, then, stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association, as Russell exemplified. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply.” The un-decent are still entitled to their full civil and legal rights but they’re not entitled for us to be nice to them. Or as Taiwo puts it, “those who relate to others as though they are not worthy of respect ought to be treated with the regard that orientation deserves.”
