What Do 'Climate Change' and 'White Privilege' Have in Common?

It's all about pretext…

The classical-liberal right came into existence to end political inequality.¹
The modern-liberal left came into existence to end material inequality.

It’s that simple. The left wants your money. They always have.

Material inequality is the inevitable result of human differences + freedom. Since human differences cannot be eradicated, the left must reduce freedom. They must use force—specifically to take your money and do with it what they wish.

People don’t like force. People know, explicitly and intuitively, that it is wrong to use force on any peaceful person who is innocently minding his own business. So the left needs a pretext. They need to make you GUILTY.

Enter “white privilege”:

When you start unpacking any specific white human person’s life, it becomes very difficult to identify any way in which (s)he has benefitted from some specifiable structural privilege. The task becomes even more challenging (and more morally repugnant) once one starts trying to unpack a specific living person’s culpability for wrongs that his/her dead ancestors may (or may not) have committed. The left’s solution is simple: Your very identity is an act of violence. You are guilty just for existing, and thus they are forever and always ‘justified’ in initiating coercive force against you.

Minorities have no legitimate beef with the average white person. The average white person not oppressing anyone or getting the better of anyone. The average white person is just living his life. But it is precisely this average white person from whom the left intends to extract resources. So they must make every single white person inherently guilty. That gives them the pretext.

Of course, that is not enough for these resource-hungry control freaks, so they have developed the doctrine of “climate change,” which casts every human on Earth as a threat to the health of the planet. You breathe. You use energy. These are hallmarks of being alive. The left has found a way to criminalize your existence. Your existence is now an act of “violence” against the planet.

Thus, they have the pretext they need. Now, you must pay to mitigate the horrible damage you are doing to the planet by existing, and unsurprisingly, the payments you make all get funneled through channels controlled by the left.

Even more—you feel guilty for harming the planet just by being alive, so you willingly pay up, to feel at least partially absolved of your crime. This too is by design. The left is selling you indulgences for your carbon-emitting sins.

White people (‘privilege’) and all humans (‘climate change’)—you must stop accepting the left’s criminalization of your existence. Stop falling for it. There is absolutely no truth to any of it. None.

In fact, it is an act of violence against you.

Masaccio - The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden/public domain

1. There are complicated but entirely justifiable reasons why the depiction of the right as being “reactionary” or in favor of “hierarchies” and the status quo is flawed. I go into these in some detail in my book. For the purpose of this short post, however, just take this statement as useful shorthand. (The right, thus understood, dominated philosophically in the 18th century and politically in the 19th. The left dominated philosophically in the 19th century and politically in the 20th.)