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Is this a great country or what? You can make lots of money telling people what a bunch of racists they are.

On July 9th, I posted a test I took designed to tell me if I am a racist. In my answers, I mentioned Thomas Sowell as a thinker I admired. Yesterday I followed up with a post linking to Sowell’s website.

I also mentioned Robin DiAngelo in that July 9th post as an example of someone who made racist remarks to which I have objected.

She’s become rich and infamous for one idea; turning the theme of Franz Kafka’s The Trial into a theory of white racism. It forms part of the canon of Critical Race Theory.

To summarize Kafka: “Any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt.” In DiAngelo’s adaptation, whites who admit their racism prove her theory. Denying racism also proves her theory.

Whites are divided into two kinds of people: (a) those who admit they are guilty of thoughtcrime, and (b) those who are guilty of thoughtcrime because they will not admit to being guilty of thoughtcrime.

DiAngelo is doing well with this gig. She refused a $10,000 fee from UW-Madison last October for a prerecorded lecture (and apparently a virtual Q&A) at UW-Madison. She pointed out that the $12,750 she demanded was already a 15% discount. Nevertheless, DiAngelo’s haul “was 70 percent larger than what was given to the event’s other keynote speaker, black author Austin Channing Brown.

Read this entire FOIA’d email thread. Turns out DiAngelo levered her passive aggressive white privilege into displacing a ‘person of color,’ who would normally have given the speech. UW-Madison showed some angst about it. Hilarious.

No doubt, it’s lucrative. There’s enough demand for being convinced you are racist by means of a logical fallacy from wealthy, white, Progressive females, that it’s spun off other ventures. White women paying $2.5K for a dinner to learn how they’re racist

For your further edification, this piece by lefty Matt Taibbi (click ‘Let me read it first’ if you get a registration page), is a great analysis of Ms. DiAngelo’s schtick.

Our Endless Dinner With Robin DiAngelo

If you check out that post on Sowell (directly below) you’ll see her type described by T.S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Eric Hoffer, Dinesh D’Souza, and Sowell himself.

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell was mentioned in yesterday’s post. Today, I thought to direct you to his website. He is a national treasure.

Don’t miss the ‘favorite quotations’ page. Five examples:

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm– but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
—T. S. ELiot

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
—C. S. Lewis

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.
—Eric Hoffer

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.
—Eric Hoffer (that was 1971, and look where we are now)

Publicly inconsolable about the fact that racism continues, these activists seem privately terrified that it has abated.
—Dinesh D’Souza

Here are some quotes from Sowell himself. One example:
“Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
― Thomas Sowell