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I Checked My Privilege, And It’s Doing Just Fine
Townhall.com ^ | May 12, 2014 | Kurt Schlichter

Posted on 05/12/2014 3:52:38 AM PDT by Kaslin

Liberals have a new word for what normal people call “success.” They call it “privilege,” as if a happy, prosperous life is the result of some magic process related to where your great-great-great-grandfather came from.

It’s the latest leftist argument tactic, which means it is a tactic designed to prevent any argument and to beat you into rhetorical submission. Conservatives, don’t play their game.

It’s easy to see that this notion that accomplishment comes not from hard work but from some mysterious force, operating out there in the ether, is essential to liberal thought. To excuse the dole-devouring layabouts who form so much of the Democrat voting base, it is critical that they undermine the achievements of those who support themselves. We can’t have the American people thinking that hard work leads to success; people might start asking why liberal constituencies don’t just work harder instead of demanding more money from those who actually produce something.

This “Check your privilege” meme is the newest trump card du jour on college campuses and in other domains of progressive tyranny. It morphed into existence from the “You racist!” wolf-cry that is now so discredited that it produces little but snickers even among liberal fellow travelers. After all, if everyone is racist – and to the progressives, everyone is except themselves – then no one is really racist. And it’s kind of hard to take seriously being called “racist” by adherents of a political party that made a KKK kleagle its Senate majority leader.

So how do we deal with this idiocy?

The proper response to the privilege gambit is laughter. The super-serious zealots of progressivism hate being laughed at, but there’s really no other appropriate response outside of a stream of obscenities. The privilege game is designed to circumvent arguments based on reason and facts and evidence, so the way to win it is to defeat it on its own terms.

Call: “Check your privilege!”

Response: “What you call ‘privilege’ is just me being better than you.”

They won’t like it. It will make them angry. Good. Because tactics like “Check your privilege” are designed to make us angry, to put us off-balance, to baffle us and suck us down into a rabbit hole of leftist jargon and progressive stupidity.

Don’t follow them. Mock them. Accuse them of adhering to a transphobic cisnormative paradigm and start shrieking “Hate crime!”

Don’t worry about not making sense. They’re college students. They are used to not understanding what people smarter than they are tell them.

Respectful argument should be reserved for those who respect the concept of argument. The sulky sophomores who babble about privilege do not. They only understand power. And we give them power when we give their nonsense the respect we would give a coherent argument.

They deserve only laughter. And to laugh at them, we simply need to refuse to be intimidated.

The plain fact is that what they understand to be “privilege” is really just what regular people understand is a “consequence.” It is a consequence of hard work, of delaying gratification and of sacrifice. No one came and bestowed this country upon us. We built it. Some of us died doing so. If we have privilege, it was earned at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg and Normandy. It’s not a function of skin tone or the number of vowels in your name; it’s a function of character.

Unlike them, many of us have lived overseas, and often in rather bullet-rich environs. Our life experience consists of more than reading Herbert Marcuse and showing solidarity with oppressed Guatemalan banana pickers by boycotting Chiquita. What we have today in this country is not anything to be ashamed of or to apologize for, but to be proud of.

Their poisonous notion of privilege is really just another way for liberals to pick winners and losers based not upon who has won or lost in the real world, but upon who is useful and not useful to the progressive project at any given moment.

This is why you see young people descended from Holocaust survivors tagged as bearers of “privilege” when their tattooed, emaciated grand-parents landed here with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Others who grew up in luxury get to bear the label of “unprivileged” because ten generations ago some relative came from a particular continent.

It’s idiocy. It’s immoral. We need to say so. For too long we’ve put up with this silliness.

What’s particularly amusing when you push back on these clowns is that they are so surprised to experience resistance to their petty fascism. Many of them, being the special snowflakes that they are, have never had anyone express to them the notion that they might be wrong. University administrators are too terrified of these whiny pipsqueaks to correct them. Certainly their helicopter parents never did – Gaia forbid that their little psyches be harmed by confronting them with their foolishness.

For too long we conservatives have played nicely, being good sports about being slandered and returning respect when offered contempt. It didn’t work. It’s time to try something new. And that something new is not taking guff from some 20 year-old gender studies major with a stupid tribal tatt, a sense of entitlement and a big mouth.

What they say is privilege is what we say is a reward for doing more with our lives than waiting for Uncle Sucker to refill our EBT cards. “Privilege” is a result of not being a human sloth, of not doing drugs, of not having kids we can’t afford them, and of not living our lives as a practical exercise in chaos theory.

Check my privilege? I just did, and it’s doing great. If you want some privilege too, maybe you ought to get your sorry behind a job.


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: liberals; privilege; racism
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1 posted on 05/12/2014 3:52:38 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin
Call: “Check your privilege!”

Response: “What you call ‘privilege’ is just me being better than you.”

Here's my response: "Know your place!"

An offensive racist statement deserves an offense racist response.

2 posted on 05/12/2014 3:55:40 AM PDT by Gaffer
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To: Gaffer

And I’d say, ‘privilege’ is just politicians who are above the law.


3 posted on 05/12/2014 4:00:42 AM PDT by FES0844
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To: Gaffer
Here's my response: "Know your place!"

Brilliant. Swiped.

Best said with a condescending sneer, too.

4 posted on 05/12/2014 4:01:05 AM PDT by Lazamataz (Early 2009 to 7/21/2013 - RIP my little girl Cathy. You were the best cat ever. You will be missed.)
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To: Kaslin

“Know Your Role “

The Rock


5 posted on 05/12/2014 4:02:44 AM PDT by Einherjar
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To: Kaslin

liberals are inherently lazy.

LIV’s are lazy.

Laziness is the root cause of inequality


6 posted on 05/12/2014 4:04:58 AM PDT by bert ((K.E. N.P. N.C. +12 ..... History is a process, not an event)
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To: bert

That arrogant pos occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave is an excellent example


7 posted on 05/12/2014 4:14:00 AM PDT by Kaslin (He needed the ignorant to reelect him, and he got them. Now we all have to pay the consequenses)
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To: bert

I had the “privilege” of working my behind off to get where I am today. No one built it for me, I did it the hard way, it’s called “WORKING”. I worked two jobs, seven days a week, went to night school three times a week (for five years) to earn my degree in mechanical engineering. Some damn liberal NEVER wants to throw the word “privilege” at me, EVER!


8 posted on 05/12/2014 4:14:08 AM PDT by DaveA37
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To: Kaslin
Rather than telling someone I am "better" than someone else (which lacks humility), I would confront them with the truth that God gives each of us certain gifts.

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith.

Romans 12:6

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

James 1:17

If someone has musical ability, incredible athleticism, mathematical acumen, communication skills, or the ability to demonstrate incredible love through service to God - all of those are gifts.

To show petty jealousy is sinful. To institute national programs and speech codes to stamp them out and attempt to inflict guilt on others because of God's gifts to us is pure Evil.

That is Communism, hatched right from the killing fields of Cambodia.

People need to watch that movie again. It has some very revisionist garbage (the hero worship of the liberal media, blaming the US military for crimes that were really the Communists, etc). But, the script could not get around telling the story without exposing the absolute evil of Marxism and Communism.

Today, under Obama's Amerika, we are instituting Communism.

9 posted on 05/12/2014 4:16:27 AM PDT by SkyPilot
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To: Kaslin
The proper response to the privilege gambit is laughter. The super-serious zealots of progressivism hate being laughed at, but there’s really no other appropriate response outside of a stream of obscenities.

I'll ask the tyrannical totalitarians to "check your privilege" right after I roll with a stream of obscenities.

OUTSTANDING work by Kurt Schlichter. Thanks for posting.

10 posted on 05/12/2014 4:19:10 AM PDT by PGalt
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To: DaveA37

And yet you are unequal....... you must become mediocre by sharing an abundance of the fruits of your labors with the lazy who shun initiative and drive because they can coerce you to give up your stuff.

Tragedy of inequality is liberalism that forces those that work to share with those that don’t work.


11 posted on 05/12/2014 4:19:58 AM PDT by bert ((K.E. N.P. N.C. +12 ..... History is a process, not an event)
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To: Kaslin

Great article. Be sure to throw the word offensive right back at them!


12 posted on 05/12/2014 4:25:48 AM PDT by csivils
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To: csivils

In a world where remarks can be examined in polite discourse, I’d ask the person who said “Check your privilege” to me to first explain the remark without using the word “white”, “Caucasian”, “honky”, “Westerner”, “slave owner [white]” et al. Then when they could not, I tell them that they were being racist and offensive.


13 posted on 05/12/2014 4:29:51 AM PDT by Gaffer
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To: Kaslin

Good article.


14 posted on 05/12/2014 4:30:17 AM PDT by sauropod (Fat Bottomed Girl: "What difference, at this point, does it make?")
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To: bert

Money for nothing and your chicks for free...


15 posted on 05/12/2014 4:31:01 AM PDT by Alas Babylon!
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To: Kaslin

Good article. I don’t get in conversations with the kind of people he’s discussing: if they’re in my little bubble of home/church/Walmart, they don’t speak to me.

When my children criticize one another, “James is just lying there in bed!” I like to respond, “Oh, that’s ripe, coming from you!”


16 posted on 05/12/2014 4:32:29 AM PDT by Tax-chick (If I offended you, you needed it.)
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To: Kaslin

i like this guy. definitely a recommended read for your friends that actually like the country


17 posted on 05/12/2014 4:33:00 AM PDT by sten (fighting tyranny never goes out of style)
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To: Gaffer

they are offensive by being

the very fact they exist and breathe American air is offensive


18 posted on 05/12/2014 4:34:11 AM PDT by bert ((K.E. N.P. N.C. +12 ..... History is a process, not an event)
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To: Kaslin

....a happy, prosperous life is the result of some magic process...

The magic comes from your own Midichlorian (is pronounced MI-DEE-CLOOR-EE-AN) level, and that is not related to race.

That Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader clocked in at 27,700 was NOT due to his white skin


19 posted on 05/12/2014 4:38:02 AM PDT by Steven Tyler
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To: bert

Laziness and IQ go hand-in-hand. Take a look at the IQ chart of nations, and you’ll start to see the “inequality”. It won’t be surprising either.

Guess the hard workers are just a bunch of gestapo loving “racists” right libs?


20 posted on 05/12/2014 4:39:24 AM PDT by Roman_War_Criminal (Bible Summary in a few verses: John 14:6, John 6:29, Romans 10:9-10)
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