From Mark Steyn:
…speaking as someone who gets called a racist by the left all the time, I’d always assumed, as when the mob take the tire iron to you in the back alley, that it’s all business, nothing personal: just what’s necessary to get the job done. It’s rather sad to find this is the way they talk in private, too. For what it’s worth, I don’t regard that Peretz quote as “beyond the pale”, but, if it is, why bother being a writer? I can’t see why anybody would want to enter a profession in which that passage exceeds the very narrow and strictly enforced bounds within which these subjects can be discussed.
…”[REDACTED] clearly must not have a girlfriend”? Oh, my!
Again, whenever the ever reliable “all right-wing men are secretly gay” charge raises its head – see how this thread quickly dissolves into the critical issue of whether it’s Glenn Beck or I who most enjoys wearing frilly panties (answer: it’s me; Glenn prefers a teddy) – I always assume that, too, is strictly business. It’s heartening to know that, in the echo chamber of the JournoList, they turn their lurid obsessions on their own.
I always wonder myself if these casual libels from so-called “liberals” that people who disagree with them are racists (and “haters,” and “homophobes”) are sincere, or if these are merely just one of the disingenuous cudgels to be brought to their ugly ideological street fights. But even when they form a circular slander squad, it’s still hard to know.
From my experience, it is consequence of lack of self-control in thought, word and deed.
The control is external (it comes from the reactions of others). These folks lack “agency”. They are true Slavs, regardless of their ethnic origin.
I think they’re a peculiar kind of sincere. A movement can often have deliberately insincere leaders who manipulate both those within and outside the movement, but the useful mob needs to believe that they’re on the right side. Bald-faced dishonesty is corrosive to morale. A peculiar kind of double-think is necessary.