My Response

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I’m going to start pasting the following in threads whenever I encounter the casual and ritualized accusations of racism from leftists.

No matter what
 
You do or say
 
They’ll call you racist
 
Anyway

Abuse of a word or concept robs it of its power. Once the accusation of racism was devastating, now it’s just annoying and merely signifies that a leftist disagrees with you. It only has real impact when made by a non-leftist.

Instead of making the equally ritualized and pointless “No, I’m not a racist” retort, I will use my new phrase to point out the robotic nature of the accusation. Everyone else should consider doing it as well. Maybe we can train them to stop abusing the word or at least force them to come up with something new.

16 thoughts on “My Response”

  1. I agree that the “no, I’m not a racist” is pointless. It’s a bit like responding to being called an S.O.B. by explaining how nice your mother is.

    Now you could just call them a racist back, but why settle for tit for tat? The best approach is to come back twice as hard and call them pedophiles. When it comes to character assassination, pedophile trumps racist any day. Seriously.

    Of course you might not want to say it directly (unless they directly called you a racist), but there is good support for the charge. I don’t think NAMBLA gets many supporters in the Bible belt and what sexual frontiers are left? Why are they so eager to push condoms and explicit sexual instruction on our kids?

    Practice copying exactly the same oblique implications, undercurrents, code words, etc. Why is Obama really so eager to talk to school children? What does he need their “help” for? Start an organization to tract left-wing child molesting groups, corrupt quasi-government agencies like ACORN and so called “civil-liberties” organizations like the ACLU and NAMBLA, lumping them all together.

    Always use the term extreme left-wing when describing child molestation rings, child pornographers and adult-child sex organizations thereby implying that child molestation is the natural progression of extreme left-wing views, which it clearly is.

    Sure, it’s absurd, but no more than the way the left uses racism to score political points and believe me, they aren’t going to stop because we of rationally answering their charges. If they had wanted a rational discussion they wouldn’t be insulting our mothers.

    -Mercy

  3. Shannon,

    This is the best counter I have found to date:

    “Charges of Racism are the last refuge of scoundrels.”

    See:

    http://hotair.com/archives/2008/10/06/frank-criticism-of-congress-is-now-racist-too/

    Frank: Criticism of Congress is now racist, too
    posted at 9:00 pm on October 6, 2008 by Ed Morrissey

    Barney Frank’s latest defense of Congress over the financial meltdown could be predicted based on the success of Barack Obama’s campaign in using the same defense. According to Rep. Frank, any attempt to pin the blame for the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the activities of both, as well as Congressional policy that fueled it, is now officially racist.

    Frank says conservatives want to blame minorities for the collapse:

    Frank charged that conservatives aim to shift blame for the market meltdown away from Wall Street and toward minority-lending laws like the federal Community Reinvestment Act.

    “The bizarre notion that the Community Reinvestment Act . . . somehow is the cause of the whole problem, (conservatives) don’t mind that,” the lawmaker said. “They’re aware that the affordable-housing goals of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and) the Community Reinvestment Act (aim to help) poor people. And let’s be honest, the fact that some poor people are black doesn’t hurt either from their standpoint.”

    Let’s keep score.

    1) Criticizing Obama means we’re racists.

    2) Criticizing Congress means we’re racists.

    3) Getting angry at Congress for pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into buying bad loans and infecting the entire financial system with essentially fraudulent paper — at a cost of up to $700 billion in taxpayer money and potentially trillions in lost investments — means we’re racists.

    The CRA was only a small part of the cause of the collapse. It affected loans only at the margins. The Clinton administration opted for more aggressive enforcement, and “community organizers” like ACORN used that to file nuisance complaints that could keep banks from merging and acquiring other banks. That may have pushed lenders into lowering standards on a handful of loans, but only to enough of an extent to avoid government sanctions.

    In that sense, the CRA is a bit of a red herring. The real cause of the collapse was the Congressional push for Fannie and Freddie to support subprime lending by purchasing the paper from lenders, which is related to the same policies that generated the CRA but isn’t the CRA itself. Lenders make money one of two ways: keeping the paper themselves and getting the interest over the term of the loan, or selling the paper to someone else for a guaranteed short-term profit. When Fannie and Freddie began buying all of this paper, they created a huge demand for subprime loans — and lenders responded by offering easy money to almost anyone who applied. They threw out income requirements and equity thresholds (such as down payments) and generated tremendous short-term profits for themselves … while Fannie and Freddie assumed all the long-term risk.

    Had the risk remained at Fannie and Freddie, the problem would never have gone beyond their collapse. Unfortunately, Congress also pushed the GSEs to securitize the debt in order to spread the risk. Investors considered those mortgage-backed securities a safe bet, backed by the US government. That’s the direct cause of the financial collapse, along with the collapse of housing prices that resulted from the sudden deflation of demand.

    Congress — and specifically Frank himself — had plenty of warning that this would happen. The anger generated from that information has nothing to do with racism, and everything to do with the breach of trust between Congress and its constituents. Frank, Chris Dodd, and others like Lacy Clay and Maxine Waters tried the racist meme out on regulators who tried to warn Congress of the pending collapse. They have to smear their critics. They certainly can’t admit that Congress failed spectacularly. Racism is the last refuge of scoundrels in 2008, and not surprisingly, we find most of those scoundrels in the Democratic Party.

  12. The biggest problem of those opposing the left is that the left has successfully defanged the accusations on the right that are often true but now considered out of bounds. In particular charges of being unpatriotic or disloyal were probably more accurate for some fraction of the American is to Blame faction of the Left than racism is on the Right. But the Left was successful in preemptively stopping that charge after 911.

    Similarly, the spectre of Joe McCarthy has prevented the calling out of people who are socialists and in some cases, communist in all but name.

    Moreover, the left has so changed the debate that even when a person is literally unpatriotic or communist, it does not have the same moral sting in the public eye as being a racist or sexist.

    The one charge left on the Right is to attack people as being against the Family or being UnAmerican. But the Left has worked to preempt those as well.

    Without equally powerful charges, the Right will lose the rhetorical debate.

    It is not true that extremism doesn’t pay.

    The Left has shown that being extreme motivates your side and embarasses the other.

  14. In the 1950s or thereabouts, all sorts of things were justified in the name of national defense. It eventually became a joke to use the national defense argument even when it might have been appropriate. In the same era, Southerners justified their peculiar practices with the argument of states rights, and as a result they pretty much stopped anyone, even today, from arguing for anything based on states rights. Racism rhetoric is probably in the process of suffering a similar fate as a result of its misuse.

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