​Something interesting about hate is how much it relies on dishonesty, both internally and externally.  I think we naturally recoil at it – we have to learn to overcome our revulsion to its wrongness, to its irrationality and illogic, to the obvious pain it causes.  We face a choice and must either fight or embrace it, or ignore it (which is maybe another way of embracing it).

Today we see so clearly the many paths it travels, the murky ways it winds around the minds of our fellows and warps their thinking.  We see the phantasms is creates for them and which they try – often seemingly earnestly – to pass off upon others.  When I was young, I remember hearing a conservative critique about Black Entertainment Television (BET).  Why is it OK for there to be a BET but not a WET, a White Entertainment Television channel? 

Now, this was 30 years ago, and even then, as a teenager I knew enough of black history and the civil rights movement to know the obvious answer (which I won’t bother with here because it’s not even worth it).  This was not coming from an explicit white nationalist.  This was standard, basically mainstream – if a tad provocative – conservative thought.  You can still find this critique, and many worse examples on the mainstream right today.   The theme is always the same: to diminish, to deny, to denigrate the black experience of racism in America. 

The corkscrew turns of excuse-making and misdirection, of blame-shifting and all manner of fallacy spill out in a toxic mess of something called conservative ideology.  But it’s really just hate at its core.  Economics, psychology, criminal justice, genetics, evolution, education, religion and any other popular political subject gets bent into service.   

There is no science or research to back up any of it.  No lived experience.  No data.  Nothing expressed in art or poetry.  It is hate that is too ugly to be named outright.  And so it must be dressed up.  It must be hidden behind euphemism and implication, pseudoscientific hand-waving and misapplied academic imprimatur.   Over the years many tactics have been tried, and many have succeeded in subtly shifting the discourse. 

Something obvious to black Americans and minorities who experienced racism first hand didn’t need to learn to see it.  Those on the radical left who studied racism and bigotries could learn to see the connections.  But the assault was so broad and cacophonous, so subtle and hard to pin down.  Did they really mean that?  How could you know what is in a man’s heart?  It was hard to prove. 
 
Liberal tradition encourages pluralism and open-minded thought.  Bad ideas ought to be discussed.  Hold them in the light of truth so as to expose their flaws!  But there is a weakness to this tolerance.  Once an idea is shown to be clearly wrong, it is time to move on.  What hate is, what causes it and what perpetuates it has been clear enough for quite some time.  It is a hierarchy in which an arbitrary marker of some group is determined to be superior to another and thus deserving of more rights.  This has been, and remains one of humanity’s great evils.  We have codified it in law with the concept of Protected Classes: groups historical discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, or other characteristics. 

And although, sadly, too many of us are denying even this truth, most still agree that this is wrong, that this is hate.  But hate isn’t honest.  Hate wears masks.  Hate deceives the wearer into believing the unthinkable: that they don’t hate.  “I am not a racist”, are words not uncommonly found coming from people who are indeed quite comfortable with racism.

So, as we see the modern conservative movement awash in open displays of brutal hatreds towards all manner of protected classes – President Trump seems to have a go at each one on an almost daily basis.  (As he has himself stated “I am the least racist person in the world”.)

It is my contention that the right wing has always given safe harbor to hate.  Even in its most charitable description, an ideology of free markets and limited government, it is essentially an ideology of protecting a system in which property owners can consolidate their wealth free from government interference.  History is clear that this leads directly to more and more accumulation of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer hands.  Capital, no more so than in the absence of government regulation, equates to power.  And given our country’s peculiar history of slavery and settler colonialism, Christianity and Jim Crow, we are literally talking about the consolidation of White Christian Power. 

There are stories you can tell about competition and free will and trickle-down theory and any number of other fantasies about “opportunity” and the “land of dreams”, and I’ll grant you that while some of it is debatable, much of it is complete bunk from a scientific perspective.  Conservatism has always been about telling a story to justify why those on top should feel OK being on top because those on the bottom deserve being there.
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But we’re all seeing more clearly than ever how much this was just a part of the lie.  The only difference now is that the movement felt the need to come out and say it out loud.  They want their White Entertainment Television and they don’t want to be ashamed about it.
Oh, and don’t complain.  They might just send you away.

​I just emailed this to The Free Press:
 
Dear The Free Press,
I am writing to you because of your reputation as champions of bold, heterodox thinking.  You are known to take brave stances that the stodgy, mainstream press has long been afraid to publish.  While universities across the countries bow their heads to communist and antifa-sympathizing student radicals, you firmly plant your flag in the firmament and say, “No, more.  This ends here.”

So, I would like to propose that you allow me to - free of charge – provide a one hour lecture to your staff at a day and time of your choosing.  My topic will be as follows: your absolute ass-pilfered, morally constipated garbage-brained gum-fuckery.  The contents of your intestines have somehow replaced your brains.  Where your bunghole once was, your eyeballs must now be, because you couldn’t see your way out of a shit-filled diaper.  Your cultural references lack the sophistication of a greasy little cockroach condom.  Your pedantry is barely risible due to the simple fact that its inarticulate blather is hardly more coherent than the pus exploding from a dead skunk’s rotting corpse.  The most horrific farts I have ever smelled have had more jeua de vivre than your nihilistic grifting confidences.    The way your pseudo-intellectual fumblings scour the American neo-fascist underbelly, searching tentacle-like for erogenous positions has no doubt earned you legitimate financial and institutional scalps.  And I imagine they will fit well onto your scabrous pate, soiled as it is after being plucked not only of every moral fiber but so too of anything resembling human skin.  And in the end maybe this is what your ultimate form will reveal: a cacophonous simulacrum of the angry man, a blistered plastique in the form of human hate, nothing but inorganic, toxic oozes, more manure than man.

Please Be In Touch,
 
If anyone there reads it, no doubt they will miss the point.  Which is that their shrill outrage over college students shouting down or refusing to platform speakers and calling it illiberal is hypocritical when I propose they invite me to give them a lecture in which I spew vile hate at them.

To put a finer point on it, to have a CK or any of countless other RW ghouls speak at your college means having them say either explicitly or imply the racial or cultural inferiority of minorities, of women, of other religions, of sexual identities being psychologically damaged, or dangerous.
Nothing I wrote in that letter touched on anyone's identity at The Free Press.  There was no broad claim that transcended and trapped the individual into membership of a broader, delegitimized class based on some arbitrary feature.

Every insult I lobbed essentially came down to personal failure.  There is at least in insults of this nature an acknowledgement of the person - that they may have failed, but they themselves *could have done better*.

​Bigotries on the other hand (which the FP loves to rescue) make no such allowance.  There is simply no escape.  This is why their logic is ultimately at best caste-based and at worst genocidal.
So any umbrage one might take at the absurdity of sitting through a lecture such as I proposed, imagine how much darker and infuriating one must be in which the words are not mere insults but directed at one's entire social class.
 
And then, adding to this insult, we have civic institutions asking everyone to politely go along for the ride.  Sit down, shut up and be good boys and girls.

Of the many indignities faced by being a 21st century human, having to place one's faith in expert consensus ranks pretty high.  The cold logic says that modern distributions of complex knowledge require a shared burden across society as no one can know all things.

Thus, the best laypeople have access to is a consensus formed within systems of knowledge, paying particular attention to the quality and accuracy of the consensus calculation.

In practical terms, this means outside our individual areas of expertise (which is 99.9% of things) we are forced to say "I don't know" and to rely on X or Y reference to established consensus view.
To argue against this logic is difficult.  Sure, many issues do not enjoy consensus.  In these cases, the best one could do is to be familiar with the strongest positions.
 
But putting that aside, it is too often the case that consensus views are challenged by non-experts.
This is modeling in popular discourse, and non-consensus views are routinely promoted, often for "clicks", as there is something titillating about presenting a narrative between two opponents, a David vs. Goliath, even. 

And when the two sides represent values laded with cultural significance, the event becomes a passion play.
 
I don't think it's new to say we've been witnessing an erosion in trust in expertise.  And maybe we can add mythmaking -  and identity reifying and taking up space within the void.

It's not hard to see how illiberalism thrives in this environment.  I've elaborated before on my understanding of the RW twin pillars of epistemic authority being traditional religious and secular cultural dogma, and the LW pillars being the diffuse tools of liberal enlightenment, such as reason, humanism, pluralism, empiricism, skepticism, etc. 
 
Maybe RW thought is basically ideations of a basic human inclination to caution & pragmatism at its best, and to domination and retribution at its worst.

If you are experiencing these impulses, what better narrative for them than a fundamentalist narrative about a harsh God that you must obey a strict interpretation of, or strict social traditions you must follow?

The problem is these narratives are incompatible with modern society.  Sure, if you want to carve out your sect, they can be tolerated within a larger pluralistic framework, but they cannot *be* the framework.
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As humans develop and technology advances, as we learn more and more about ourselves, the more and more obvious this becomes. 
 
I think the RW realized this at some point and had a decision to make.  What was that famous "split" a few years back - between the Catholic guy who wanted to retreat to a sect, and the guy who wanted to start a war to dominate the world?
 
The truth in these two paths is this: they cannot play the game.  They either destroy the game, or play by themselves alone. 

In practical terms, the religious among them don't want to work next to a lesbian and not be able to tell her she's going to hell.  The secular among them want to - I guess - be able to say retard and not pay so much in taxes.

And I get it.  They are constantly angry.  The cognitive dissonance of modern life drives them crazy.  Everything reminds them of how wrong everyone else is.  They are always scared, confused, angry, and sad about "the way things used to be".

So, if we get through this, we don't include them in the constitution.  It's better this way.  Better for them because they don't have to worry any longer. 

​They can maybe find a state somewhere.  Call it Gulchnesia or something.  They can't do a colonialism thought - even though, man would that be up their alley!
 
What about Antarctica.  It would be perfect.  They could be tough and rough.  Survive off fish and seaweed. Build houses out of stone.
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Meanwhile out constitution would have a global wealth cap.  Guaranteed equality for protected classes.  Guaranteed education, healthcare, daycare.  I don't know what else.  Some kind of socialist shit. I'm no expert.