Former CIA top dog John Brennan tuned in to CPAC over the last few days, and was disgusted by what he saw – not just because he voted Communist in 1976 and is still very far to the left, but because white people were behaving there in a way that made him sorry to be among their number: “I’m increasingly embarrassed to be a white male these days,” Brennan claimed, “with what I see other white males say.”
Brennan, scrambling for the moral high ground, charged that the only acceptable Republicans were the ones who were indistinguishable from Democrats: “With very few exceptions, like [Sen.] Mitt Romney, [Rep.] Liz Cheney, [Rep.] Adam Kinzinger, there are so few Republicans in Congress who value truth, honesty, and integrity.”
Sure, whatever, John, but try to stay on point: aren’t Romney, Cheney, and Kinzinger, um, white? Were the speakers you hated at CPAC saying things you disliked because they were white, or because they believe in principles you likely detest, such as the freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, and the need for free and fair elections?
Brennan was, of course, just reflecting the zeitgeist: those who tell us that racism is virtually everywhere and must be eradicated at all costs have no problem demonizing one race and ascribing to it all the ills of society. It is now acceptable on the Left to despise white people as a group, and Brennan’s ridiculous statements reflect that. Search through the Twitter feeds of the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah or activist Shaun King and you’ll see statements about “white people” in the aggregate that would result in firing and ostracism if they were said about any other race. All this has given rise to the recrudescence of one of the most shameful phenomena in American history – claiming to be of a different race in order to escape social opprobrium.
ANOTHER Rachel Dolezal? George Washington University Prof Admits Her Black Identity Was a Lie
Back in the old South during the Jim Crow days of institutionalized racial discrimination, some light-skinned blacks tried to pass for white in an attempt to avoid the discrimination and harassment that blacks faced all too often in those days. The old folk song “Delia” mentions “men in Atlanta, tryin’ to pass for white.” Jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton has been criticized for allegedly denying that he was black.
This phenomenon is not dead. There are still people trying to pass as members of another race. There is Hilaria Baldwin, the upper-class Bostonian who pretended to be Spanish for a decade. The white Jewish professor Jessica Krug passed as black for years. So did Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP official who famously turned out not to be a CP at all. Still at it is Shaun King, aka Talcum X, who strenuously insists that he isn’t white despite photographic evidence of his being a light-haired white child before he was woke.
Then, of course, there is Elizabeth Warren, as white a white person as you’ll ever find, who for years passed as Native American for social approval and career advancement. She was even hailed as the first “woman of color” on Harvard’s faculty. What color? A light peach, apparently.
Muslim “feminist” activist Linda Sarsour is also passing: in a Vox video published in January 2017, she revealed: “When I wasn’t wearing hijab I was just some ordinary white girl from New York City.” But in an April 2017 interview, Sarsour referred to “people of color like me.” All it took was a hijab to enable Sarsour to change races.
Baldwin, Krug, Warren, Dolezal, King, and Sarsour are the vanguard of the society the Left is working hard to create – a society in which being white carries so much of a social stigma that it results in job discrimination and more, and those who are clever and audacious enough to pull it off avoid this opprobrium by passing as being a “person of color.” Today, to be white is to be evil. No wonder John Brennan tangles himself in incoherence while trying to escape the stigma.
Race hatred should be no more acceptable today than it was in the days of Jim Crow. No one should ever feel compelled to pass as a member of another race. Soviet dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, an enduring hero of freedom and one of the towering figures of the twentieth century, gave the most apposite response to today’s stigmatizing of whiteness: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” John Brennan and plenty of others.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His new book is The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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