Elitist Scapegoating

 From Eric Metaxas at The Stream:

None of these perfectly logical and apt arguments against open borders fits Moore’s scapegoating narrative. The only reason people hold different views from his is that they are inherently bad and beneath contempt, and almost certainly overweight and racist. What else is there to talk about? There’s nothing to see here but Social Darwinism, folks. Please keep moving.

Moore’s subhuman view of people who disagree blinds him comprehensively. It prevents him from supposing that perhaps Americans of all colors have been traumatized by the way medical and government elites have abused their power during the two years of this pandemic. That Americans no longer trust those elites with the lives of our families. Or that we despair that the journalistic class has abdicated its vital role, and has joined the chorus of voices such as Mr. Moore’s, who can only dismiss us as uneducated crackpots.

He appears not to know that Black Americans were inordinately suspicious of the vaccines precisely because they had been subjected to government overreach — and medical experiments — in previous decades. Or perhaps he has set this aside, lest it muddy the necessarily Caucasian cartoon picture.

Moore’s parting sneer, citing fears of “Satan-worshiping pedophile rings,” completes the calumnious portrait, conflating thoughtful conservatives with Q-anon conspiracy theorists. But that’s just how Moore rolls. When images of slavering hook-nosed Jews appeared in Der Sturmer, all the “right people” knew such things might be exaggerating the truth, but at least they were acknowledging it, at least they were on “our side.”

Because Moore portrays these people as his cultural inferiors, their efforts can only be seen as fear-based and as selfish — and as secretly motivated by that hoary raison of the radical left, an inveterate hatred of the “Other.” And it’s only the other side that otherizes, ever. Got it?

But let’s ask two questions. Were William Wilberforce and the evangelicals of his time merely warring politically in working against the Slave Trade? And was Bonhoeffer’s heroic call for German Christians to stand against the Nazis really somehow about “societal conquest”?

Moore naturally follows the current fashion in lionizing what these two figures did, but this too is perfectly subjective. We cannot forget how viciously Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer were criticized by their own political enemies — usually socially elite “Christians” — who similarly accused them of vulgarly sullying their faith by dragging it into the realm of politics where it had no business, by engaging in precisely what such as Moore and Hunter today denounce as “culture warring” that “contradicts the Cross.”

Bigotry rarely sees itself as such, preferring to hide behind some fig leaf of moral imperative. And bigots — who have the cultural upper hand — always demonize and scapegoat the weak. In Wilberforce’s day it was perfectly acceptable to look down on African blacks. All the right people “knew” they were inferior, which is why they thought Wilberforce’s efforts — daring to go against the tide of elite opinion — to be impossibly vulgar. In Bonhoeffer’s day it was similarly perfectly acceptable to look down on the Jews of Europe. (Read more.)

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