Detonating the Base of the Intersectional Hierarchy

Or, Not Playing Nice in Clown World

Conservatives are nice people. This is generally fine, but whoever said being nice cost you nothing must not have lived in clown world. By being overly agreeable, people with a conservative disposition habitually make the grave mistake of conceding every seemingly harmless point up until an obviously terrible thing happens. In that moment, having conceded the terms of engagement, they have no recourse. The terms are laid out innocently, in the irresistible language of liberal universalism and personal kindness—nice people do not resist. Nice people won’t complain about the boot on their neck—or if they do, few have the temerity to really fight back.

Transgender activists know this, which is why in the mid 2010s, the language of “preferred pronouns” entered the scene. The movement’s more obviously destructive goals—to kill women’s right to free assembly and association—began with slight modification of language. How does it hurt you to call me by the name and referents I chose for myself? They asked. If it does not hurt you, then you must do it… because not doing so would hurt me. Niceness compels the use of preferred pronouns. But a request so superficially sweet escalated without resistance, over just a few years, to male felons “identifying” as women in order to rape female prisoners in penitentiaries which had been opened to them precisely to accommodate the language of delusion. 

Nice people won’t bring this up in polite company. But those exhausted by this pervasive, maximally uncharitable passivity (in other words: not nice, very bad, something-phobic mean people!) should be brainstorming how to fight back. A proposal for my not-so-nice readers: dissidents should consider whether or not the same logic of subversion be applied in reverse, in the service of the truth, to a sexual/racial counterrevolution. What subtle linguistic subversions might be used in real life to unshackle oneself from the bonds of the progressive matrix, in other words, the intersectional hierarchy? 

It can be undone from the inside out if infiltrators are willing and insistent enough to change key definitions of words—that is, to use their relativism against them. In the same way that radical leftists have stretched the definitions of marriage, gender, and, uh, infrastructure, in order to get what they want, those who oppose the new orthodoxy must be willing to break the rules. If existing categories referred in any meaningful way to reality, you might have some moral qualms about this kind of subversion. But they do not. Since we are living in the society the Left has wrought, both words and base reality itself are subject to infinite, personal interpretation. Their made-up categories are arbitrary. In destroying our institutions, the enemy has weakened their own.

On any given application to any given school or job in the current year, some section inevitably requires that the applicant check several boxes in order to categorize themselves within the intersectional hierarchy. These victim olympics rely on the self-identification of straight, white males, the base of their pyramid, in order to stand. Every time a straight, white male self-identifies as such, he resigns himself to permanent subjugation, and confirms the validity of the system that seeks to subject him to unyielding abuse.

My question is this: what’s stopping anyone from identifying as multiethnic and gender-nonconforming on every job or school application they fill out from now on? Who ever told you you were white? What does that even mean? Given that the vast majority of white people in this country are hodgepodge mixes of several European ethnicities, it would actually be much closer to the truth to identify as such. What’s stopping straight applicants from identifying as gender non-conforming? Who is to say that you do or do not conform to an ephemeral category which they themselves have reduced to meaninglessness?

Conservatives may poke fun at Elizabeth Warren for her dubious indigenous ancestry, and it is funny because it’s clearly ridiculous, but the fact remains that Warren was willing to stretch the already tenuous definitions of race under an illegitimately ordered system to her advantage, and as a result, she has exerted more power and influence over politics and culture than most of her detractors could dream of.

The real fight against the Malthusian enemies of humanity begins at the beginning: with words. It begins with the willingness to exert power over language. It begins when nice people stop playing along.

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Helen Roy is a contributing editor to The American Mind and American Mindset.