Andrew Sullivan Can Fuck Right Off

Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Andrew Sullivan, a bologna sandwich with a British accent, has weighed in on tech writer Sarah Jeong’s hiring by the New York Times in a new piece for New York magazine. He used the word “neo-Marxist” twice. It was terrible.

Sullivan—writing for a magazine that this month will publish an essay by Steve Bannon about Donald Trump—defines “racist,” a label he sticks Jeong with, as “a vicious hatred of an entire group of people based only on their skin color.” He then goes through a series of her tweets which he claims exemplifies this “vicious hatred.” One example he gives is “White men are bullshit.” Truly damning stuff.

“I can’t say I’m offended by this—it’s even mildly amusing, if a little bonkers,” Sullivan writes. (One might venture a guess that he is actually laughing.) “But it does reveal a worldview in which white people—all of them—are cultural parasites and contemptibly dull.”

Believing that this is in any way comparable to the genocide and institutional racism perpetrated by white people against nonwhite people in America (and the entire Western world) is a patently ahistorical view, but Sullivan already knows this. The history of racism in the United States has frequently been explained to him by much smarter people every time he says or does something racist, such as publishing excerpts from The Bell Curve (a thing, by the way, that he continues to be unrepentant about doing).

But yes, Sullivan does Go There:

A little more disturbing is what you might call “eliminationist” rhetoric — language that wishes an entire race could be wiped off the face of the earth: “#cancelwhitepeople.” Or: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.” One simple rule I have about describing groups of human beings is that I try not to use a term that equates them with animals.

That’s right: Sullivan believes Jeong’s tweet that white men are “canceled” is racist and an implicit call for genocide. One might even call it “white genocide,” which definitely has no racist connotations either historically or contemporarily, not at all.

Meanwhile, here’s Sullivan less than ten days before he turned the tender young age of fifty:

To give Sullivan some credit, he does at one point explain the correct position on all of this (aside from his bonkers assertion that the left believes women cannot be racist). Unfortunately, he only does this so that he can say that this view is wrong and the people handwringing over the perceived oppression of white people are right:

But the alternative view — that of today’s political left — is that Jeong definitionally cannot be racist, because she’s both a woman and a racial minority. Racism against whites, in this neo-Marxist view, just “isn’t a thing” — just as misandry literally cannot exist at all. And this is because, in this paradigm, racism has nothing to do with a person’s willingness to pre-judge people by the color of their skin, or to make broad, ugly generalizations about whole groups of people, based on hoary stereotypes. Rather, racism is entirely institutional and systemic, a function of power, and therefore it can only be expressed by the powerful — i.e., primarily white, straight men. For a nonwhite female, like Sarah Jeong, it is simply impossible. In the religion of social constructionism, Jeong, by virtue of being an Asian woman, is one of the elect, incapable of the sin of racism or group prejudice. All she is doing is resisting whiteness and maleness, which indeed require resistance every second of the day.

The unspoken premise of this blog, of course—which pops up later in a more explicit way, when Sullivan shifts his attention to his hysterics about the left’s call for open borders—is that there’s a real, genuine threat to the existence of white people in America in 2018. This is, of course, bullshit, but especially so at a time when the American government appears to be wholly preoccupied with reaffirming a racial hierarchy which places white people at the top.

After claiming that the New York Times’ milquetoast-ass statement about Jeong “will only serve to deepen the kind of resentment that gave us Trump”— yes, really—Sullivan concludes:

Yes, we all live on campus now. The neo-Marxist analysis of society, in which we are all mere appendages of various groups of oppressors and oppressed, and in which the oppressed definitionally cannot be at fault, is now the governing philosophy of almost all liberal media. That’s how the Washington Post can provide a platform for raw misandry, and the New York Times can hire and defend someone who expresses racial hatred. The great thing about being in the social justice movement is how liberating it can feel to give voice to incendiary, satisfying bigotry — and know that you’re still on the right side of history.

In Andrew Sullivan’s world, reverse racism and “raw misandry” are equivalent to the systemic oppression of people of color that’s still ingrained in every aspect of American society, and should be treated as such. His is a world that does not exist, no matter how many dumbfuck columns he writes trying to make it so.

Sullivan is always going to write what he’s going to write. The bigger problem is that the editorial leadership of New York feels that after a decades-long career of fuck-ups that would doom the career of most young journalists of color, Sullivan’s perspective on these issues—as a wealthy Oxford and Harvard-educated white man—is still sorely needed, for what is presumably a very handsome fee. It’s almost as if his identity gives him some kind of inherent power that isn’t afforded to everyone.