The question has been looming for many years, but intensifying of late. The cynical use of the fraudulent term “antiracism” to promote racism—but the good kind, where it’s white people who are the targets of stereotyping, hate and discrimination—has exploded on the culture, with many, many people, businesses and organizations too cowardly to stand up and say, “Enough.” At some point, decent Americans of all races will have to do so in great and overwhelming numbers. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.
I was thinking of all this after reading a truly disturbing essay by Elie Mystal. Mystal is a black lawyer and pundit who teems with hate. The last time Ethics Alarms sullied its cyberpresence by mentioning him was in January of this year, when he tweeted this:
If you search for Mystal by using his tag here, or just use the Ethics Alarms search engine to find “Mystal,” you can get an even uglier picture of the man, a lawyer who has a double Harvard degree and has used it to spread the maximum amount of racism and racial division such credentials can permit. It is an open question whether Mystal is mentally ill, but if he is, it is a kind of mental illness that the Left now celebrates. And he has a apparently always been this way. In 2016, he advocated black jurors sabotaging the justice system:
“Black people lucky enough to get on a jury could use that power to acquit any person charged with a crime against white men and white male institutions. It’s not about the race of the defendant, but if the alleged victim is a white guy, or his bank, or his position, or his authority: we could acquit. Assault? Acquit. Burglary? Acquit. Insider trading? Acquit.Murder? … what the hell do you think is happening to black people out here? What the hell do you think we’re complaining about when your cops shoot us or choke us? Acquit. Don’t throw “murder” at me like it’s some kind of moral fault line where the risk of letting one go is too great. Black people ARE BEING MURDERED, and the system isn’t doing a damn thing to hold their killers accountable. Sorry I’m not sorry if this protest idea would put the shoe on the other foot for a change.”
I wrote, “Mystal is bonkers. There’s no reasoning or fairness in his screed. He’s just fulminating, growling and slobbering like a rabid dog. It’s sad. Nobody can take anyone who expresses this kind of irrational hate as a response to frustration seriously. He’s not accurate, he’s not truthful, he’s not responsible. He has left law and logic so far behind he may never work his way back to them.”
Well, he clearly isn’t working his way back, and won’t. The latest from Elie is a post in “The Nation,” where he is the “justice editor,” which tells you all you need to know about both “The Nation” and its readers. Mystal felt secure in revealing the dark depths of his hate by extolling his favorite video-game, “The Sims,” because it allows him to create the perfect neighborhood, or what he thinks would be one:
“….I picked a neighborhood and moved all the prepackaged Sims out. I moved my Sim family and Sim friends in. I have to be around Sims that I want to be happy, after all. No Republicans are allowed in my game. I’ve even deleted the files of prepackaged Sims that give me any kind of Republican vibe…. The friends I do put in the game are people I really like in real life, people I’m happy to be reminded of as my Sim-self jogs through town… My world is much browner and, well, gayer than what I started with. That’s just what happens when you let Sims flirt with whomever they want and marry people who share their interests. But I do occasionally have to add a family I don’t personally know just to decrease the chances of inbreeding: So, the Obamas are in my game. Sasha grew up and married my grandson. I’m buried in their backyard. Frankly, I couldn’t write a better utopian postscript for myself: a founding member of a brown, gay, rainless world that banished Republicans who is buried under the kiddie swing of his progeny…. Sometimes, I just need the terrible world to leave me alone with my doll.”
It isn’t a terrible world, but people like Mystal, hate-blinded, arrogant bigots and nascent totalitarians, are doing their utmost to make it one. The sentiments he vomits out stamp him as no different from any German intellectual who argued for the ejection of Jews from 1930s German society, nor distinct from the Klan members who used tactics of terror to try to drive Black Americans from the south. Oh, Elie thinks he’s different, because he knows who deserves to be hated, shunned, and if possible, purged. But he’s not different from his racist predecessors, not in any way.
Well, in one way: no white lawyer or pundit today who openly expressed the desire to live in a world with as few blacks as possible and an absence of progressives would ever be employed by a media organization that wasn’t derided as representing the worst of the United States. Mystal, however, in addition to being an editor at “The Nation,” is also a frequent contributor to the left-wing legal gossip site “Above the Law” and (I suppose this isn’t surprising), a regular guest of fellow racists like Joy Reid on MSNBC.
Ethical Americans of all races, creeds and political affiliations have an obligation to categorically reject any news organizations, or any organizations period, that give Mystal (or others like him, of which, unfortunately, there are many, especially in universities, city governments, Congress and the Biden Administration) a platform to divide the nation and traffic in bigotry. I won’t watch MSNBC, stopped follwoing “Above the Law” long ago, and even without Mystal, there has never been any excuse for reading “The Nation.”
There is no “good racism,” and if bigotry makes you “happy,” as it does Mystal, you are the problem, not the solution.
The frightening part is that Elie Mystal is so certain his favorite species of hate is sufficiently on the ascendant that he can be candid about his views of what a perfect world would be. If he’s right that being openly bigoted is acceptable if it’s the “right” bigotry, the ethical among us have a lot of work to do.
Ethics Alarms 
There are black professionals and professional blacks. Like Sharpton and a slew of others, their “job” is being black. And with that one must present a certain style and you have gone into great detail explaining that style.
“If he’s right that being openly bigoted is acceptable if it’s the “right” bigotry, the ethical among us have a lot of work to do.”
If you think he is incorrect, I submit that you haven’t been paying close attention. It’s going to be a while before the US gets jolted out of this, just like we got jolted out of the 1960s by Watergate and the collapse of South Vietnam, and spent the rest of the 1970s getting over the hangover.
People should be careful what they write (I know, I know, physician, heal thyself), since it gives others a window into their minds. I enjoy creative writing too, but what he’s talking about isn’t creative writing, nor even fantasy writing, it’s just hatred poured out on paper. He’s no different than the Jacobins who wrote about the day when the last king would be hung by the entrails of the last priest. I make no bones about the fact that I do not like Islam nor its radical adherents, but even if I decided to go Tom Clancy I wouldn’t write about a world in which the Middle East was turned to glass by nuclear strikes. I am disgusted by what American cities have become, but I wouldn’t write a dystopian future in which all the major cities are “Escape From New York.” I can’t stand radical feminism, but I wouldn’t write about a world where all women are “listed” and have no choice but to marry whoever the controller of the list picks.
I did come up with a dystopian future in which the US is split into the Commonwealth of the Atlantic (Boston to DC, about as far west as Harrisburg) , the New Confederate States of America (the Southeast), the Free Alliance of the Plains (everything else except the West Coast), and the People’s Republic of Pacifica (the West Coast), but that’s also understood to be in response to an apocalypse-type event, not racism and partisanship going crazy.
While the Free Alliance of the Plains would include America’s Dairyland, I sense the potential for…um…ABUSE…
Probably just called “the Alliance” by most people. Actually a good 60-65% of the people living there pay very little attention to any authority, while the rest owe allegiance only to whatever surviving city they call home. There are huge numbers of roving bandits, wandering cowboys, mercenaries for hire, motorcycle gangs, mountain men (mostly in the Rockies) Indian tribes who’ve gone back to the old ways, river and lake pirates, and anything else wild and relatively lawless you can think of. That’s before we get into mutants and monsters.
I fear that there’s a swath running through FAP from NM, though CO (mostly I-25 corridor), western WY, & parts of MT, though AZ gives one cause for concern, and I wonder how you’d handle NV. Just thinkin’ from here in the Rockies.
New Denver and New Albuquerque are still standing. The former is a neo-socialist tyranny, the latter half republic, half police state under the Council of Rangers. Colorado Springs has gone half Wild West, half sci-fi, although the USAFA still consider themselves Americans and maintain a fort-type setup, with a small fleet of aircraft. The I-25 road itself is broken up in several areas and no longer runs the whole length. New Phoenix is a complete police state under a Joe Arpaio-type Sherriff-Governor, New Tuscon claims control over it, but that’s in name only. Nevada is mostly desert, with tribes of Paiute, Shoshone and Pueblo Indians and displaced whites who are culturally partially similar to cowboys, partially similar to Bedouins or Riffs (minus Islam) competing for scarce water resources. New Carson City is nominally still the capital, but its power extends no farther than the hydroponic farms just outside the main city. Las Vegas is a ghost city, abandoned since its main industry became worthless. It’s populated only by monsters, mutants, and humans who are either insane (though these have now dwindled to a few as the monsters and mutants kill and eat them) or running from someone or something and hiding out where no one is likely to come after them.
“How Long Will Black Bigots Like Elie Mystal Continue To Get The Benefit Of A Double Standard?”
“Ethical Americans of all races, creeds and political affiliations have an obligation to categorically reject any news organizations, or any organizations period, that give Mystal (or others like him, of which, unfortunately, there are many, especially in universities, city governments, Congress and the Biden Administration) a platform to divide the nation and traffic in bigotry.”
Agreed, but obviously the objections and protestations of conservative white Christian cis-gendered male heterosexual baby-boomers like me will have minimal impact on any of these institutions outside of my community, and the soft, self-absorbed and self-loathing urban and suburban white liberals are the chief enablers of much of this lunacy. It doesn’t do any good for people like me to publicly state, “If you see any of these hateful fools in a restaurant, in a department store, in a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd! You push back on them! You tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!”
The “benefit of a double standard” will, I believe, continue until great numbers of Blacks -at least a vocal plurality of Blacks in leadership roles- have the courage to make their rejection of this hatred and “anti-racism” known, and stand up to this malignancy. Why? For the same reason I denounce racism against Blacks or any other racial group: because it’s the right thing to do. A quaint concept, for sure.
How long will it go on?
The double standard exists because it works. It will continue until it stops working.
If you can’t beat ’em, delete ’em.
If he believed the lifestyle and beliefs of his Sims was superior to that of the ones he labeled “Republicans” wouldn’t he have wanted to enjoy watching his Sims convert the others?
He doesn’t want them converted. He wants them banished, presumably somewhere far, far away. He never wants to see anyone who might disagree with him again. The scary thing is that there are people who read this and nod right along, but would be horrified if it were the other way around.
“Sasha grew up and married my grandson.”
This is 100% not creepy or invasive at all.
Adults play games like this one and Fortnight? That’s weird.
Well, giving Elie the benefit of an “adult” label is pushing it.
I played a lot of Sims in my early 20s. It was how I blew off steam during grad school. I was reading a lot of Updike at the time and my Sims behaved accordingly.
But I sure as hell never published an essay about it. I can’t even get into the segregation or the patronizing “gay brown universe” BS. I’m still stuck on Mystal assuming we care he plays the Sims and having his grandson marrying Sasha in-game. Like really, imagine this being your relative.
Every current day liberal or progressive or, let’s face it, Democrat, fervently believes the only thing standing between them and Heaven on Earth is the continued existence of the Republican Party and its elected officials and voters. This guys simply comes right out and says it. Most won’t. The left genuinely desires one party rule. But of course, Republicans and anyone who opposed a single aspect of lefty thought are an existential threat to Democracy. Go figure.
“This guys simply comes right out and says it. Most won’t.”
Someone opined not too long ago here that Lefties are starting to say the quiet part out loud, AKA arrogantly overplaying their hand; it won’t play well with moderates.
Pingback: WATCH: Guest On 'The View' Calls The Constitution 'Kind Of Trash'