The Hate in a Hashtag

Mourning in modernity continues to evolve. First, it was the candlelight vigil–a sentimental, ecumenical way to grieve, and more importantly, be seen to grieve, usually with lyrics from a pop song replacing the funeral prayer. Then it was a throwaway hashtag–something like #PrayforJessie, tweeted out by people who either don’t believe in God or believe in the fuzzy Morgan Freeman egalitarian deity of most contemporary churches. And now, we have the final step, where the victims themselves are forgotten, and questions of life and death possesses meaning only if they further a profitable Narrative. We commemorate the end of a life with a hashtag that has nothing to do with those killed.

Katrina Dawson exercised her White Privilege to go to a coffee shop. She ended up a hostage at the hands of “Sheikh” Haron Monis, an Iranian immigrant and “refugee” out on bail after being charged as an accessory to the murder of his wife. The good Sheikh also amused himself by writing letters to the parents of Australian soldiers killed overseas. During the Siege in Sydney, Monis carefully instructed his hostages to tell the outside world that they were being held by someone acting on behalf of the Islamic State, a demand which was largely refused. After all, who is Monis to describe the “root causes” for his own actions?

Even as Australians were under the guns of a zealot, one Rachael Jacobs quickly understood what needed to be done. On a train, she saw a woman on a train fiddling with her headscarf while looking at her phone, presumably reading the news. In what is surprisingly not self-parody, Jacobs recounts:

Tears sprang to my eyes and I was struck by feelings of anger, sadness and bitterness. It was in this mindset that I punched the first status update into my phone, hoping my friends would take a moment to think about the victims of the siege who were not in the cafe.

A few miles away, another hostage, shop manger Tori Johnson, heroically rushed the gunman. He was killed, but the shots provided the impetus for the police to storm the shop. Johnson has some minor recognition because he was gay and can be used to criticize Australia’s conservative government.

Dawson was shot and died on the way to the hospital–the Huffington Post’s story on Johnson’s sexuality dismisses even Dawson’s name, describing her simply as “another hostage.” As a cisgendered mother of young children, she’s a less politically useful victim than Johnson.

But even as hostages were ripped apart by bullets and police exchanged fire with a self-styled terrorist, Jacobs was involved in what she saw as a far more important drama.

After they got off the train at the same spot, Jacobs supposedly asked the woman with the headscarf if she could walk her back. Jacobs said nothing else.

“I wanted to tell her I was sorry for so many things–for overstepping the mark, for making assumptions about a complete stranger and for belonging to a culture where racism was part of her everyday experience. But none of those words came out, and our near silent encounter was over in a moment.”

As Jacobs herself admitted, she didn’t know if the woman was actually Muslim. Nor did she know if she was reading about the hostage situation. Nor even if the woman simply removed her headscarf because it was hot or just because she felt like it. As “no words were exchanged,” the woman most likely thought than an unstable and bizarre stranger was accosting her while she was trying to get home.

Of course, this assumes that the encounter actually happened–which it probably didn’t.

Jacobs created an entire drama in her head based on the vague collection of clichés and jargon that encompass her demented worldview. And as we’ve learned from the University of Virginia hoax and so many others, the Narrative of White Male Oppression takes on a terrible force within the consciousness of those who subscribe to it. Even if the woman with the headscarf never existed, Jacobs undoubtedly believes there is a greater truth contained within her Facebook parable. As someone else once said, “In my mind–I believed it.”

Incidentally, who is Rachel Jacobs? You probably couldn’t have imagined that she’s a “lecturer in Education at the Australia Catholic University in Brisbane.” And she was a candidate for The Greens party who thinks refugees need to be given “hope” instead of being sent back home, but worries that climate change will “ruin our economy.”

Jacobs humblebrags that “my actions were not extraordinary or heroic.” But she didn’t actually take any actions. She asked a woman a question, and had some feels. Maybe.

The Muslim woman is scenery for Jacobs’s moralpreening, a story that literally begins and ends with Jacobs making assumptions about a woman and then getting on social networking to tell everyone how great she is. The drama takes place within her own head.

More importantly, there was no “backlash” from Australians against the Muslim woman. Insofar as she did anything, if indeed she did anything and if this headscarf woman even existed, Jacobs prevented a Muslim woman from feeling shame at the actions of her co-religionists. And these days, maybe shame is something Muslims ought to feel.

The best part of the story is what Jacobs does consider heroic. She burbles, “The #illridewithyou hashtag, started by Twitter user @sirtessa and embraced by thousands, is the real story of inspiration.”

Here again, a non-event (a hashtag proposing to unnecessarily accompany people, instead of actually doing it) in response to another non-event (a backlash against Muslims in Australia) is a “story of inspiration.” A modern act of heroism or inspiration is like a “modern family”–exposed as non-existent by the very act of its promotion.

Who is @sirtessa anyway? Why, she’s exactly what you would expect. Tessa Kum is an Internet SJW and “PoC” engaging in “The Long Campaign Against Racism” who posts 10,000 word excerpts on how much she hate Whites. For example, in an excerpt selected by Steve Sailer, Kum writes:

I’m learning about hate because I am coming to hate you, White person. You have all the control, all the power, all the privilege, and there is nothing holding you accountable. I hate the double standards and hypocrisy you display, the rank dishonesty of your conduct. I hate that you can harm us, when we cannot harm you. I hate that you have actually impacted on careers, multiple and not even directly, with your hypocrisy. I hate that you’re so dominant in the publishing industry there’s very few venues I’d consider safe to even submit to now. I hate what you have done to PoC I don’t know. I hate what you have done to PoC I do know. I hate what you have done to me, and I was not involved.

Jacobs too is a PoC who takes the opportunity of a Muslim murdering two White Australians to insult Australia. She writes:

I am, however, the daughter of Indian migrants, and having lived all of my 37 years in Australia, I feel I’ve seen the best and the worst this country has to offer. I’d rather deliver a message to racists, bigots and anyone who dares to derive a message of hate from this tragedy–it is you who are unwelcome here. Your values have no place in civilised society, and if you spread intolerance, there’s an avalanche of kindness ready to take you down.

Notice that despite having lived all of her 37 years in the country, it’s still not “her” country, but simply “this” country in which she resides. The end of the “White Australia” policy didn’t create proud “PoC” Australians ready to help build the country, but an influx of parasites ready to tear down what their peoples couldn’t build on their own. Of course, Australia should be grateful–in the United States, we made the equivalent of Jacobs the President.

Lest I be accused of overstating the case, step back and examine Jacobs’s comment about “the victims of the siege who were not in the café,” by which she meant Muslims. The hypothetical inconvenience of Muslims in Australia, which thus far exists only Jacobs’s own crazed mind, is equivalent to the murder of two Whites. There was no backlash against Muslims after the attack, any more than there was against them after Ft. Hood, or the murder of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo in Canada, or after the next “random” Islamic murder that will happen next month and the month after that. As Mark Steyn joked, “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”

The larger problem in all this is that Muslims in Australia aren’t enemies of the state–they are the government’s mascots, dangerous pets designed to justify an ever-increasing expansion of government programs and regulations. Even the conservative government of Tony Abbott reneged on a campaign promise to repeal Section 18C, the Australian equivalent to the Canadian “hate speech” that “criminalizes saying truthful things about the consequences of mass immigration.”

The probable consequences of this attack will not be restrictions on Islamic immigration but further media demands on Abbott to abandon his largely popular program of immigration control. Far from unleashing mobs of crazed skinheads on innocent, defenseless Muslims, Australia has created a system where it’s illegal to even criticize them. And it’s the “compassionate” refugee and immigration programs that led people like the “Sheikh” into the country in the first place – as well as anti-White activists like Jacobs and Kum.

Jacobs sneers, “Decent Australians don’t hold an entire group of people responsible for the actions of one man.” But what, after all, is “White Privilege” but all holding #yesallWhitepeople as guilty by their very nature? Economic status, beliefs, and behavior are all irrelevant, as Whites owe a debt to “PoC” by their very existence.

Thus, the death of two innocent White hostages is devoid of social significance–or is at least secondary to the hypothetical inconvenience of Muslims. Whites are killed and yet they are still the villains. The devastation wrought upon children who have be told mommy isn’t coming home ever again is secondary to the courage and heroism displayed by someone using a hashtag premised upon something that didn’t happen. (While we’re at it — #HandsUpDontShoot.)

The bodies aren’t even in the ground and Australians are being lectured about what racist scum they are, even though they haven’t actually done anything. It’s a reckless fury that passes understanding, a total indifference to the human cost if the facts do not fit with the frenzied insistence that White Privilege is always to blame. Under the media telling us how heartwarming and wonderful Jacobs and Kum are, we can see the hatred that animated these acts in the first place.

This manner of thinking is best explained by the power of faith. Those who don’t come from an evangelical Christian background are often surprised when evangelical friends interpret relatively normal events–a job offer, meeting a new friend, or encountering a minor difficulty like a tough exam–as “signs” or “tests” from God. This doesn’t mean they are crazy or strange–they have a metaphysical outlook that gives meaning and context to the events of their lives. The great attraction of evangelical American Christianity, whatever its other failings, is that it provides a kind of program for ordering life in the here and now and answers in confronting the hereafter. But it also means evangelical Christians often “see” things which others simply don’t or interpret them in ways that seem bizarre to everyone else.

Those who would scorn the ‘vangies are often the most fanatically devout congregants in the far more irrational faith of egalitarianism. They impose the same kind of metaphysical structure on their daily life.

#BlackLivesMatter–if they are killed by White cops. Otherwise, just like Black on White crime, it’s simply a “random occurrence.”

A trivial event like seeing a possibly Muslim woman loosen a headscarf reduces you to tears and forces you into a heroic struggle for justice.

A hashtag takes on cosmic significance.

Meanwhile, a murder within your own town is utterly devoid of meaning. Again and again we see the very family of a murdered European denying any significance to the death of their loved one and assuring the media that the victim was not a racist. Otherwise, presumably, he or she would have deserved it.

Every day is a chance to witness your faith. Every interaction with Whites is fraught with the potential for martyrdom. Every deviation from the Egalitarian Truth is an opportunity to purge the heretics. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that underlying all of it is a fierce hatred, a fury against Europeans worldwide that can’t be quenched by grants of material prosperity, political power, or even outright cultural surrender.

Thus, the artificial struggles of dangerously unstable and defective individuals drive the discourse of the day. You can say you don’t care, but the mass media being what it is, you are going to engage with it on some level, whether you like it or not. After all, you can’t even escape to your video games anymore. More importantly, your tax dollars and the money you spend on “apolitical” things like food, clothes, and basic consumer goods are empowering these people–and funding the missionary efforts of a genocidal creed.

All that’s left is the armor of contempt, the “mute protest in your own bones” that it was not always and doesn’t have to always be this way. And from the catacombs, all we can do is build the mythos and the faith that will one day drive back this darkness, and give peace to our honored dead.