On Being Moronic

Prof. Rebecca Walkowitz of Rutgers claims that the only way to deal with racial inequality is to get rid of grammar altogether.

2,276 words

The word “moronic” was never a particular favorite of mine, but a few years ago it started coming to mind increasingly at things I heard people say. At first I thought I must be getting less tolerant, but I eventually concluded that there was indeed a rising tide of moronity. To record the fact, I started making a note of statements that especially triggered me.

Before reviewing some of these, let us remind ourselves what a moron is. As psychologists used to use the word, it denoted the top class in the league of unintelligence. Morons had a mental age of 7-12, followed by imbeciles with a mental age of 3-7, then came idiots with a mental age of under 3. So in morons we are looking at people who can tie their shoelaces, understand fractions, and formulate ideas; it’s just that their ideas won’t rise to the level of an adult’s or indeed a teenager’s.

Jared Taylor pointed out in 2021 that there is a huge, unsatisfied demand for racism in America resulting from the fact that while for many whites it is the only acceptable explanation of black behavior, there isn’t enough of it to make the explanation work.[1] Elle magazine brought the shortage to an end with an article entitled “Why white silence on racism is deadly,” which showed a hoarding bearing the words “Silence is Complicity.”[2] A deadly form of racism could now be found in any white person who hadn’t mentioned racism recently. Was the article’s author a moron? Had she been white she would have been, but, she tells us, she is black, so this looks like strategic mass accusation rather than moronity.

Jared Taylor also mentioned a professor of Asian-American studies named Jennifer Ho who says that when blacks attack Asians, white people or something emanating from them are behind it.[3] She concedes that such attacks might be fueled in part by racism, but insists that they are also fueled “very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it.” Is this woman a moron? If she believes what she writes, she is; otherwise she is just a menace.

One has to distinguish morons from people who are just pretending. Also in 2021, a British teacher mentioned the word “nigger” when explaining the contrasting pronunciation of the word “Niger.”[4] When children reported him to his superiors, the latter opened an investigation. Presumably they weren’t moronic enough to think that there was anything to investigate, but thought that they’d better act like morons.

A different sort of pretend-moron is Rebecca Walkowitz of Rutgers University’s English Department, who reacted to the death of George Floyd by saying that students should no longer be taught grammar. At least, they should no longer be taught it as we understand it; they should be taught “critical grammar.”[5] This would contribute to the eradication of systemic inequities facing black people, make the department anti-racist, and promote culture change. Who was she trying to kid? She didn’t want to change the culture; she wanted to get rid of it, and like many before her was using black people as a fulcrum to help heave it off the cliff. She sounded moronic, but was really sly and vicious.

Undoubtedly the accusations flung at white people have become increasingly moronic in recent years, as well as increasingly hostile and monstrous — or on the other hand, trivial. White people treat black people as though their lives don’t matter; their industry is bringing the world to an end; they beep their horns on the wrong occasions.

Not that there is anything moronic about the concept of microaggressions, or at least about thinking it up and selling it. That was quite clever. Look at it: a way of claiming to have been wronged when nothing out of the ordinary has happened, with members of only one race being able to make the claim. But then, getting white people to worry about upsetting black people is not exactly difficult. Black people must sometimes wonder why they don’t have to try harder.

Why did people treat the Black Lives Matter critique of white society as though it might have merit, when it wasn’t just aggressive and malign but moronic? They must have had a societal death-wish.

On breakfast television in 2020, the race opinionator Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu was asked to comment on the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue.[6] She saw it as an act of resistance that represented the breaking of chains. She didn’t say resistance to what or whose chains needed to be broken. No desecration of a monument was as devastating as the desecration of black lives, she said. If she thought that enslaving people and treating them as commodities was desecration, she seemed to be forgetting that every slave bought by white people in Africa was pre-desecrated by other Africans. More moronic than her speech, however, was the way she made it. The statements just fell out of her. No mental activity seemed to be taking place.

Also in 2020, Boris Johnson exploited ambiguity in the usual way when he announced a commission to look into all aspects of racial inequality.[7] We must do more to tackle racism, he said. What did he mean by inequality: inequality of treatment or inequality of circumstance? What did he mean by racism: failing to treat the races the same or failing to treat them differently? David Lammy, a black Member of Parliament, was unhappy. We had already had two inquiries; what was needed now was action. Lord Simon Woolley, who is black, said that the commission must lead to structural change. Labour’s shadow “equalities secretary,” a non-white woman, said that the pandemic had exposed deep structural inequalities. Then for some reason the BBC showed someone white: Christine Jardine, the Liberal Democrats’ “equalities spokesperson,” who saw the commission as a welcome first step, which showed that the BLM protests were “working.” Despite the commission’s recommendations being unknown because the commission hadn’t reported yet because it didn’t exist yet, she said that they must be implemented without delay. That’s moronity.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.

Incidentally, if you wonder why most of those named as morons or possible morons here are women, it is not by design. That’s just the way it goes. Women are always in the majority among the foot soldiers of political correctness, as you’ll see in Dictatorship of Virtue (1994)[8] as much as in Cynical Theories (2020).[9] Dubious men introduce moronic ideas; unthinking women pick them up and run with them. They like to be in fashion.

Returning to “white supremacy,” it is an odd term for anti-racists to have chosen to signify something they’re against. Supremacy is the state of being supreme, top of the tree, the best there is. Are anti-racists attacking whites for being the best there is? Or do they mean that whites are supreme in power, tyrannically ruling over the other races? Seriously? Jennifer Ho defines white supremacy as a system of values and beliefs, which makes about as much sense as calling someone’s inferiority a system of values and beliefs. You know morons are in charge when a phrase such as this can be endowed with negative associations regardless of its meaning and used as a weapon of attack.

Moving from race to other topics, the media didn’t like the British government’s original coronavirus policy of letting “herd immunity” develop, which in retrospect would have been the right one. How did they turn the public against it, thereby helping to force the government to make a U-turn? They described the term “herd immunity” as insulting because it compared us to animals.[10] You can’t get a more moronic argument than that, but apparently it was the best the media could think of.

Was it moronic of doctors and nurses to spend hours rehearsing for performances to put on TikTok when we were supposed to think they were overburdened with medical work? It certainly wasn’t very bright.

It was reported in 2021 that the International Olympic Committee had issued new guidelines stating that “transgender women” should no longer be required to reduce their testosterone levels to compete in women’s sports, nor should there be a presumption that they had an automatic advantage.[11] Why don’t these morons forget about transgender women, testosterone levels, and automatic advantages, and just segregate sports by sex like they used to: men over here, including “transgender women,” and women over there?

Today’s gladiatorial contest is the cooking show. The dramatic music suggests that we are witnessing a struggle to the death, when in fact the question is whether a cranberry is out of place. But the underlying theme is submission to authority. All that a junior chef ever says to the top chef is, “Yes, chef!” Contestants must accept the word of the judge with humility and contrition. The shows treat people like morons. In one, a woman looked into a saucepan with prawns floating in it and said that it contained prawns. The judge repeated the word before leaving an ominous ten-second gap, then said, “Prawns are in the bouillabaisse! Well done, Carrie, good job!”

Television producers love to defeat their audiences’ expectations. Take the example of Dragons’ Den. First the designer gets the studio painted black, then the lighting team keeps the subject in the dark. Next, the cameraman pretends to be incompetent, getting things out of focus, pointing at anything but the person speaking or zooming in on something irrelevant, such as their shoes. Once, when a bicycle ridden by two people with a passenger at the front came on, it was impossible to make out even its basic design. Another time, I only gathered that a pony was in the studio from the fact that someone mentioned it, before glimpsing a hoof as I strained my eyes to see the animal. Nor must we forget the video editor, who makes sure there is no continuity between any two adjacent clips. It’s what Michael Hoffman calls the revelation of method, where you don’t just frustrate people’s desire to be communicated with but draw attention to the fact that you are doing it so as to impress your power upon them.[12] These producers don’t treat people like morons so much as try to turn them into the kind of morons who will consume this as entertainment, thereby creating a population that will take any insult or abuse.

When I was at school, we were taught to look for the right words. Nothing was worse than resorting to a cliché. Today we hear little else. There is no such thing as an opportunity, only a window of opportunity. No one can be sacrificed or disposed of; they must be thrown under the bus. People don’t make contributions or have talents, but bring things to the party; nor do they volunteer or take their turn, but only step up to the plate. They never get to the point or dispense with the preliminaries, but always cut to the chase; nor do they proceed to the next stage of something, or extend or develop or improve it, but only take it to the next level. It is as though people had become morons with tiny vocabularies containing only a few stock phrases.

Somehow we’ve got into a situation where we deny the basic facts of life, such as that we are male or female, that the sexes differ, or that the races do. If we don’t deny them, someone certainly wants us to. They also want us to affirm what is obviously untrue, such as that eating meat is bad, that being grossly overweight could be quite good, and that it would be a calamity if the world’s average temperature rose by two degrees. There’s definitely a plan afoot to turn us into morons.

In conclusion, there’s a lot of moronity out there, but not as much as I had thought. Much of what at first looks like moronity turns out to be calculated hostility, mostly on the part of non-whites, aimed at whites. The moronity is mainly on the part of whites. It’s time we started wising up.

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Notes

[1] American Renaissance, June 4, 2021, “GEORGE FLOYD ONE YEAR LATER.”

[2] Elle, June 2, 2020, “Why white silence on racism is deadly.”

[3] The Conversation, April 8, 2021, “White supremacy is the root of all race-related violence in the US.”

[4] GBNews, June 21, 2021, “Woke Watch: Teacher disciplined for saying the name of West African Country.”

[5] Anthony Brian Logan, July 29, 2020, “Rutgers University Declares Grammar RACIST For Black Lives Matter!” According to an open letter from Rutgers, contrary to some reports Rebecca Walkowitz did not declare grammar to be racist; she explained her department’s plans to teach “critical grammar,” by which she meant ceasing to limit writing instruction to sentence-level issues such as grammar. See Reuters, Aug. 4, 2020, “Fact check: Rutgers University did not declare grammar ‘racist’.”

[6] Good Morning Britain, June 9, 2020, “The debate gets heated over whether controversial statues should be removed.”

[7] BBC, June 15, 2020, “Black Lives Matter: ‘Much more that we need to do’ to tackle racism — PM.”

[8] Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue: How the Battle Over Multiculturalism Is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country, and Our Lives (New York: Vintage Books, [1994] 1995).

[9] Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody (no location: Swift, 2020).

[10] For a reference to this idea, see The Lancet, Sept. 19, 2020, “A history of herd immunity.”

[11] GBNews, Nov. 21, 2021, “Transgender women in sport: Andrew Doyle and his guests discuss recent IOC ruling on testosterone.”

[12] Michael A. Hoffman II, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare (Coeur d’Alene, Idaho: Independent History and Research, [1989] 2001).