'I Checked My Privilege, And It’s Doing Just Fine'

While Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang already did the groundwork in blowing up the latest Marxist-primitivist* meme from academic left, Kurt Schlichter deftly inserts the bayonet into its still twitching body:

This “Check your privilege” meme is the newest trump card du jour on college campuses and in other domains of progressive tyranny. It morphed into existence from the “You racist!” wolf-cry that is now so discredited that it produces little but snickers even among liberal fellow travelers. After all, if everyone is racist – and to the progressives, everyone is except themselves – then no one is really racist. And it’s kind of hard to take seriously being called “racist” by adherents of a political party that made a KKK kleagle its Senate majority leader.

So how do we deal with this idiocy?

The proper response to the privilege gambit is laughter. The super-serious zealots of progressivism hate being laughed at, but there’s really no other appropriate response outside of a stream of obscenities. The privilege game is designed to circumvent arguments based on reason and facts and evidence, so the way to win it is to defeat it on its own terms.

Call: “Check your privilege!”

Response: “What you call ‘privilege’ is just me being better than you.”

They won’t like it. It will make them angry. Good. Because tactics like “Check your privilege” are designed to make us angry, to put us off-balance, to baffle us and suck us down into a rabbit hole of leftist jargon and progressive stupidity.

Don’t follow them. Mock them. Accuse them of adhering to a transphobic cisnormative paradigm and start shrieking “Hate crime!”**

Don’t worry about not making sense. They’re college students. They are used to not understanding what people smarter than they are tell them.

Read the whole thing. And as Moe Lane quips, “I think that I may try Thanks for admitting that you’re inferior to me! as a response, on those regrettably infrequent times that I get specifically trolled.  The response might be entertaining.” Of course, as Glenn Reynolds noted when linking to Fortgang’s post, “This is an eloquent response, but ‘don’t be an asshole’ is an entirely adequate one.”

* Apologies for repeating myself there.

** Or shouting “Micro-agression!”