“Toleration”—The Camel’s Nose under the Tent

2,426 words

“Moral judgements and condemnations constitute the favorite revenge against those less limited.”

                                      —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

When thinking in general terms about how people, individually or in collectives, react to what they perceive as threats to the status quo, what comes to my mind is the question of toleration. How much threatening change one is willing to tolerate is a challenge that tests one’s commitment to his principles and measures the reservoirs of one’s courage.

Toleration, in my view, is a difficult concept to get a fix on. Its connotation is largely positive. “Intolerance” today is strongly associated with bigoted, narrow-minded people, often with those who are deeply religious and have strict moral codes with sanctions for the violation of the norms. Toleration, originally urged by John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, was instrumental in breaking the Anglican church’s religious monopoly in the American colonies.

In 1786, Madison managed to have the legislature adopt Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, the signature moment in which the state completely repudiated the principles of establishment and toleration in favor of liberty for all denominations. The new statute declared that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious Worship place or Ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.” This set a critical precedent for the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791.

Christianity in twenty-first-century America has been sufficiently neutered (secularized), and so Christian sects (denominations) no longer need to practice toleration because they care little about what differentiates them.

As noted above, the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the “establishment of religion.” However, as we approach the United States Semi-quincentennial, a secular religion has been insidiously established. Americans now find themselves required to worship the God of Equality, who now reigns in a Cult of the Supreme Being, redolent of the Jacobin’s reign of terror during the French Revolution.  There is no “toleration” for “inequality” dissenters, as one of  science’s greatest geniuses, James Watson, was to discover.

Instead, “toleration” has converted to a catch phrase for the multi-culturalist in twenty-first century America, now at the breaking point. It resonates with the modern, individualistic, secular world as a disposition that is supposed to reduce conflict and enable groups and individuals with greatly differing “value systems” (the burka versus the thong) to deal with each other peacefully and respectfully.

It’s quite obvious that toleration is more praised than practiced, particularly by the elites of the ruling class. Its pretense adds another layer of the hypocrisy that Americans must suffer from the power brokers who exempt themselves from the rules the ruled-over live by. One might recall Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 referring to Trump voters as a “basket of deplorables, irredeemables, thankfully not part of America.” Her slur evoked for those paying attention the “concept of the political,” Carl Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” distinction. She was signaling “no mercy,” much less toleration for the “deplorables” if she were to grasp the reins of power.

Consider the self-reflexive paradox that befalls an enthusiast of toleration: “I will not tolerate intolerance.”  Like the Liar’s Paradox—“Everything I say is a lie”—it ensnares the utterer in contradictions.

Moreover, no individual perhaps other than a complete nihilist would espouse unlimited toleration. What one refuses to tolerate tells us as much, or more, about his character than what he tolerates. Another paradox is that of typically Left-liberals, who urge toleration and boast of their tolerance for others, refuse to tolerate homophobes, transphobes, sexists, racists, as they label their “enemies”—a good portion of the entire world—which makes them among the most intolerant people on the planet.

The multiculturalist capture of “toleration” presents a broader meta-ethical problem that we have with the Left, which is its appropriation of moral language and changing its use to fit into a constantly shifting ideological landscape. “Hatred” is perhaps the most egregious example. For the Left “hatred” has been deformed to mean “oppose” or “disagree.” So, for example, if you are opposed to gay marriage, you “hate” gay people. In similar fashion the Left has contorted “intolerance” to mean “disapproval.” So, if you disapprove of gay marriage, you are “intolerant” of gay people, a bigot. This is clearly a misuse of the term.  Toleration logically implies disapproval. You don’t tolerate what you don’t disapprove of. The fact that you disapprove of something is what forces you to decide whether or not to be tolerant of it. You may disapprove of your daughter shacking up with her boyfriend, yet you tolerate the arrangement and remain on good terms because of your affection for her. Or, you disapprove of your wife cheating on you, and you express your intolerance with the help of a divorce lawyer,

Intolerance as disapproval works for the Left as it is another arrow in their quiver of moral coercion that breaks down the existing moral consensus and order. What is “moral” is always a moving target for the Left, an element in their strategy of keeping the opposition bewildered and on the back foot. “Toleration” for a Leftist, means you must approve of his deviancy—announced in many cases to be a “civil right”—because you are a morally defective person if you disapprove. Leftists use the courts and liberal-controlled institutions (public schools, teacher unions, universities) to coerce conformity to their constantly “enhanced” moral codes to the point of policing the words we use, including pronouns. Not all that long ago, no one was thinking, much less pretending to believe that a man who claims to be a woman is a woman. But in the alternative universe the Left has been constructing, its moral code has been amended to affirm that absurdity that the sex of a child is “assigned at birth,” and that “misgendering” a “trans person”—stating what is a fact—can be a criminal offense. From the dictatorship of the proletariat to the dictatorship of the pronouns.

From the State of California, Civil Rights Department:

CALIFORNIA LAW PROTECTS TRANSGENDER AND GENDER NONCONFORMING PEOPLE FROM DISCRIMINATION, HARASSMENT, AND RETALIATION AT WORK.

THESE PROTECTIONS ARE ENFORCED BY THE CIVIL RIGHTS DEPARTMENT (CRD).

If bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms are sex-segregated, can employees choose the one that is most appropriate for them? Yes. All employees have a right to safe and appropriate restroom and locker room facilities. This includes the right to use a restroom or locker room that corresponds to the employee’s gender identity, regardless of the employee’s sex assigned [sic] at birth.” (italics added)

The transgenderism phenomenon fits into the “activism” paradigm of the Left, put in place in the 1960s. It has proved to be wildly successful in part because of Conservative Inc.’s desire that the Left honor them for being tolerant. The paradigm involves the continuous expansion of victim groups with “rights” that suddenly spring into existence out of nowhere, conjured up to fix things that are not broken—“a right to safe and appropriate restroom and locker room facilities.” Step one is a process of agitprop, targeted vilification of those to blame for the “hatred” of the selected group. Its vulnerability requires legal protection in the form of newly invented “rights” the group members now magically possess. It involves the creation of neologisms that stigmatize the unenlightened and foster their social ostracism—“homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “transphobe”—key elements of the style sheet with which the Left’s propaganda mills bombard the public. The aim is to insert the invented vocabulary of victimization into every day, normal conversation; get the normies to talk like social justice warriors. Step two is a resort to law courts and legislators on behalf of the newly selected victims backed by manufactured moral outrage. Step three, the new victim group acquires the protective, legal status awarded by the mafia that operates the “civil rights” extortion racket. Accepting the newly awarded protective victim status is for the out groups, “an offer you can’t refuse.” The entire “civil rights” operation closely resembles the criminally coercive modus operandi of organized crime.

Toleration as the Left pushes it is a practice that always means losing for the Right. It is the transmission belt that seems to drive America inexorably leftward. Today’s Left-leaning moderate was yesterday’s conservative; tepid opposition turns to tepid support and then turns mainstream. The center shifts Left and the radical fringe pushes on to break down new barriers leaving “conservatives” to play catch up.

To survive, the Right must abandon toleration as it is understood and practiced by the Left and operate with these three maxims.

Maxim one (M1): you always get more of what you tolerate.

Maxim Two (M2): you get even more of what you subsidize.

Maxim Three (M3):  you get less of what you punish.

The Leftists understand M1 which is why they urge toleration but never practice it themselves. They count on the Right to “police” their ranks and purge those who resist the “progressive” innovators. Pseudo conservatives Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich broke with the majority of their party in support of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a Federal holiday. Sam Francis understood what was about to happen. “Martin Luther King’s legacy, as its keepers know, is profoundly at odds with the historic American order, and that is why they can have no rest until the symbols of that order are pulled up root and branch.” For this, Francis was cancelled by the go-along-to-get-along conservatives. Joe Sobran, likewise, was purged by William F. Buckley for speaking the truth about Israel.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Confessions of a Reluctant Hater here

Thus, we see a predictable confirmation of M1 that translates as unconscionable surrender. The toleration by conservatives for elevating such a deeply flawed and corrupt man like MLK Jr. to be symbolically honored beside George Washington would mean that conservatives would get more of what was “at odds with the historic American order.” It unleashed a deluge of pathological white-racist, white-privilege ideology that now permeates popular culture and is propagated by the mainstream media, the educational establishment, and the entertainment industry. From the apotheosis of a fraud like MLK, a plumet downward to the manufactured martyrdom of career felon, George Floyd, replete with riots, the legal lynching of Derrek Chauvin, and assaults on white heritage symbols—“symbols of order pulled up root and branch.” You will always get more of what you tolerate.

The Leftists also understand how M2 works and have amassed instruments that subsidize what Conservative Inc. tolerates. During the Biden reign of terror, conservatives were targets of massive tax-payer sourced funding to NGOs that paid for anti-populist, anti-white propaganda campaigns and for the agitation and disruption campaigns of Left-wing “activists” like BLM. A form of non-financial subsidy was the spectacle of white people having to publicly self-flagellate, that is, virtue signal their guilt to a fevered pitch that left no doubt as to the sincerity of their self-loathing. By embracing MLK Jr.’s “content of their character, not the color of their skin” trope, Conservative Inc. abandoned resistance to the forces of the Left, leaving them to amass the resources used to complete the destruction of traditional America.

Conservatives have failed to learn or forgotten the power of M3. Perhaps they should turn their gaze toward Singapore.

From the BBC:

Singapore hanged three people for drug offences last week [of November, 2025] bringing the total number of executions to 17 this year – the highest since 2003… Singapore has some of the world’s harshest anti-drug laws, which it says are a necessary deterrent to drug crime, a major issue elsewhere in South East Asia. (italics added)

“Singapore’s barbaric drug control regime is increasingly alone on the world stage,” local activist group the Transformative Justice Collective said, noting that “it is one of a few countries that continue to execute people for drugs offences.”

With all due respect for the “Transformative Justice” activists—recall, in 2008, Obama promised to “transform the United States of America”—here is a question that should be put to them: would you rather live in Singapore or St. Louis, Baltimore, or Detroit? Something to consider as to whether “being alone on the world’s stage” is such a bad thing: “Crime rates in Singapore are some of the lowest in the world, with petty crimes such as pickpocketing and street theft rarely occurring, and  violent crime being extremely rare.” Singapore is widely considered one of the safest countries in the world. Check out NationMaster comparative crime statics: murders per million people; U.S., fourteen times more than Singapore; rapes per million U.S., ten times more than Singapore.

While punishment has fallen out of fashion in our feminized, therapeutic Western democracies, when one looks in places where the authorities practice it with consistency and determination deviancy drops precipitously. In the liberal-democratic societies of the West, the post-WWII explosion of “rights”—as studied by Carl Wellman, The Proliferation Of Rights: Moral Progress Or Empty Rhetoric?—has led to the creation of massive state-subsidized NGOs whose sole purpose is to shield what was once criminal or deviant behavior from punishment. The enforcement of immigration law has been systematically obstructed, permitting the inundation of illegal immigrant into the U.S. making them immune to legal punishment. Vagrancy laws, which once helped to keep American streets safe, have been dismantled over the years by “civil rights” activism.

Once again, the Leftist leaders understand the friend-enemy concept of the political and they never hesitate to “punish” their enemies. President Obama in November, 2010, was quite open and explicit in a Univision interview while on the campaign trail.

If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us’ — if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election — then I think it’s going to be harder.

The Left has never hesitated to punish its enemies, which is why it has been so successful in achieving its goals and why our supposed “two-party” system is in reality, a uniparty with two factions that take turns betraying the voters.

An authentic conservative Right would have no toleration for the Left, embrace M3, and view the “progressives” as enemies to be punished.  Otherwise, extinction.