Over the past couple days in Australia we have witnessed a tidal wave of leftist support for the brown lesbian soccer player Sam Kerr, led by mainstream journalists.
This was provoked by her being charged with racially vilifying a White British police officer by allegedly calling him a “stupid White bastard” during a night out on the piss in London last year.
Conservatives have responded predictably, by pointing out the hypocrisy of “anti-racist” leftists refusing to condemn racial vilification because the alleged victim was White.
If it wasn’t already clear enough, the reaction to this event has unequivocally demonstrated that leftists don’t actually subscribe to “anti-racism” as a universal ethical principle, but merely as a selectively applied justification for their denial of White dignity.
But what conservatives need to be focused upon in this episode is not the familiar and banal highlighting of leftist hypocrisy and mental gymnastics, but the more important observation that the left are partisans rather than ideologues.
The leftist definition of “racism” – that it is “power plus prejudice” and therefore White people can never be on the receiving end because their skin colour gives them privilege by default – has been echoed across the media from far-left outlets such as Crikey to the centrist-presenting Channel 7.
Talking about Sam Kerr on the last The Latest last night @7NewsSydney pic.twitter.com/dvZXEo11Yd
— Dee Madigan (@deemadigan) March 7, 2024
The art of politics in many respects is framing all attacks upon your enemies as defensive actions, and this is precisely what the leftist definition of “racism” achieves.
By this definition, non-Whites can attack White people upon the basis of their race with impunity because it’s actually a form of defence against the structural conditions of “White Supremacy”. And at the very least they can excuse such attacks as legitimate expressions of frustration at the “White privilege” those structural conditions supposedly afford.
Heads they win, tails you lose, White man. Do you feel privileged?
It is this partisanship which is the key to leftist social and political dominance.
Where conservatives constantly seek to justify themselves by reference to the universal fairness of their principles, the left weaponises how their principles are framed in the service of partisan loyalty.
The result of this is that the right prioritises its commitment to abstract ideals above its political opposition to leftism, handicapping its resistance, while the left gains further advantage by doing the opposite.
Conservative thought leaders only defend people accused of racism on the grounds that they weren’t in fact racist, they don’t redefine racism in order to absolve their side of all moral culpability no matter the circumstances.
And while conservatives might congratulate themselves for their consistency, this is the attitude of “beautiful losers”, as Sam Francis so aptly described them.
Where conservatives seek to define “racism” in terms which neutralise conflict, leftists define it in terms which justify their aggression and delegitimise conservative defences against it.
For leftists, “anti-racism” is just a means to the end of their political goal of denying White dignity in order to legitimise White political disempowerment.
For conservatives, anti-racism is framed as an end in itself, a way to neutralise racial conflict, not advance it.
Conflict, however, is the reality of politics, whether we like it or not. If one side is constantly seeking to advance conflict while the other contents itself with merely attempting to neutralise it, this will inevitably result in the one-way momentum we have witnessed throughout living memory – a momentum of leftist victory, and therefore of White defeat, as to the left there is no higher principle and no more important objective.
Conservatives have demonstrated the weakness of their principles over partisanship approach by their feeble response to the Sam Kerr controversy.
The best that Australia’s most prominent conservative media talking head, Andrew Bolt, could muster was the predictable calling out of “leftist hypocrisy”.
Apparently Kerr has “done us a huge favour” by exposing this hypocrisy, according to Bolt, but of course he doesn’t actually explain how exactly the left is supposed to be punished for it.
Bolt correctly pointed out that if the races were reversed the left would be up in arms. But where the left would be demanding the hypothetical White racist be professionally ruined, and be willing to protest in the streets and maybe even riot if they didn’t get their way, Bolt didn’t even bother to demand that Kerr be stripped of her captaincy of the Australian women’s soccer team.
And neither did any other leading voice in the Australian conservative movement, journalist or politician. So it seems that leftist hypocrisy has worked out just fine, yet again.
The left do not care if conservatives think they are hypocrites, they only care about defending their own and attacking their enemies – which they do ruthlessly and hysterically whenever they get the opportunity.
Until the right learns to stop listening to self-sabotaging conservative condemnations of “hypocrisy”, “cancel culture” and “identity politics” – all tactics which their enemies deploy to great success, and which the right sorely needs to start utilising if they want to level the political playing field – they will remain principled losers.
And what good are principles if you are too weak to enforce them?
