It’s nice that Saturday Night Live let an un-p.c. media personality who’d previously made controversial remarks about blacks back onto the show. I refer not to comedian Shane Gillis but Nikki Haley (who’ll likely exit the presidential race after further primary defeats a week from now on Super Tuesday).
I take her SNL cameo to mean she’s now considered “establishment” enough to deserve the courtesy of a chance to jokily clarify her failure (in an earlier town hall appearance) to mention slavery as a cause of the Civil War. That’s fine, and I’m always in favor of greater clarity, though one suspects her remaining Republican primary rival—Donald Trump, currently less tolerable to the media bigwigs at shows like SNL—wouldn’t be handed such a safe, tailor-made opportunity to do damage control just before a big vote.
No matter: Trump’s making rapid gains among non-whites regardless, and it’s plainly freaking out the left. They wish everyone would get offended on cue, as they’ve been training us all to do for the past decade or so—especially whenever Trump says something edgy and cynical, like his remarks to a black conservative group just prior to the South Carolina Republican primary (which broke about 60/40 for him over Haley) about how blacks probably sympathize with him more now that his mug shot and courtroom travails have been in the news. He’s gangsta, is Trump’s theory.
He may well be right, and SNL itself did an unusually clever sketch making a similar point back around the time Trump first ran in 2016, showing a white male Trump supporter bonding with a black female non-Trumper over their mutual distrust of the establishment and things like cell-phone-enabled tracking. “Nope,” as the white male character played by Tom Hanks wisely put it in reaction to the government’s offer of a free cell phone, “that’s how they git ya.”
It’s entirely possible to recognize ways in which law and public sentiment have been unfairly skewed against blacks and at the same time to recognize ways in which the establishment, at least occasionally, tries unfairly to skew things against whites. Decent people of any hue object to both tendencies. Thus, there are probably plenty of tech-savvy young black people who are rightly wary of white cops tracing their cellphones and who also rightly think tech companies are fishy for doing things like skewing image search results to give the false impression that typical inhabitants of Ireland are black or otherwise non-white.
The whole of humanity is nowadays united, across color lines, in seeing your bias and deception, establishment puppeteers, not to mention your liberal, faux-moralistic condescension in thinking you have a unique right to deceive the world in the name of ethnic harmony (or any other cause, from solar panels to war). Reversing the valences on racism is still racism.
Yet at countless companies such as Red Hat, to name another tech firm, the staff gets sternly lectured about how it’s “whiteness” that stealthily rigs, conceals, and exploits the rules of corporate life.
Meanwhile, at Netflix, Obama himself consults on the creation of the movie Leave the World Behind, which combines (A) the stunningly narcissistic idea that whites crave glamorous black visitors to show them the road to moral redemption with (B) the message—in an out-group/in-group combo as strange as Obama himself —that the intelligence community is right to focus on hardening the national electrical grid against potential EMP attacks.
People get paid big bucks to clumsily weave these high-priority establishment messages together, as surely as 1990s sitcoms had an unnatural abundance of cellphone-related plotlines. It’s creepy (and in the case of this Netflix film is bundled with gratuitous subplots about things like the white homeowners’ masturbating teenage son, which may also be an establishment priority for some reason).
From my vantage point at the political margins, the most disappointing thing about such media products may be the evidence they offer that even anarchist and “cypherpunk” themes have long since been coopted by the establishment, since the Obama collaborator who brought you Leave the World Behind, Sam Esmail, is the guy who seemed sort of radical just a few years ago when producing the series Mr. Robot. That drama depicted Occupy-like and Antifa-like hackers as heroes, up against governments and corporations. Now its creator pushes fashionable ethnic moral offsets and, implicitly, mindbogglingly expensive electromagnetic public works projects, like a punk musician turned AT&T spokesman.
Back in the real world, nowhere near the political margins, Obama lobbied (admittedly in vain) to get Harvard to retain its head plagiarist, president Claudine Gay. She’s black and female, which to some, such as Al Sharpton, is the important thing—these days outweighing even the vaunted standards of the Ivy League.
But people from all tribes are starting to notice that no matter how much the purported leaders of society harp on our tribal divisions—implying we’d tear each other apart without their refereeing—those leaders have more abstract, even more sinister loyalties than old-fashioned tribal ties. Claudine Gay may have thought she could plagiarize and still deserve a prestigious Harvard post, but she also thought at least one black male professor deserved to be stripped of tenure for doing research on crime statistics that ended up debunking the assumption that cops are significantly biased against blacks (an Indian-descended female colleague of his was reluctant to report their findings for fear of political reprisals).
It’s not blacks or any other humans that matter to the establishment today, in other words—nor whales, orphans, what have you—but the usefulness of such living, breathing props for keeping everyone on-message. One longs for a truly discordant note, from any sector of society, in any medium.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey