This morning, my amusement was snagged by this headline “The intolerant student Left has even turned on me — a lifelong civil rights campaigner” and I click to read it. It’s about 500 words or more of a crusty old white man clutching his pearls. 

For the record, I honestly don’t know anything about this man. We aren’t in the same country. I don’t recognize his name. He’s nobody to me.

As such, I don’t really know anything about the situation he is describing or the other ones that he links to. So beyond the general fact that, as a white man, he support white supremacy by default, I have no real reason to think he’s anymore racist than any other given white man.

Until he provides evidence against himself:

Universal human rights and enlightenment values — including John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty — are often shamefully rubbished as the ideas of Western imperialist white privilege.

Reading this one sentence, I quickly begin to understand why none of the student activists he is decrying wish to engage him on any level. He’s hopeless and cannot be redeemed. As such, it makes perfect sense to me that he be prevented from spreading his ignorance in places devoted to education.

How can you have an open and productive conversation with someone so ignorant and unwilling to examine his own biases? Someone who so clearly believes that, as a White Man(tm), he is most certainly the Default Human(tm)? Someone who literally and actually thinks that a book written hundreds of years ago by another crusty white man ought to be applied globally? And yet doesn’t manage to see how this is imperialism?

It’s extra amusing given that he’s British and they are the assholes who colonized a goodly portion of the world and fucked it up with their ‘universal human rights and enlightenment values’.

What gets me is just how incredulous he is. Like. Can’t we all just see that he is a Good White Man(tm) and recognize his greatness? The fact that he takes it as patently obvious that he is entitled to any and all platforms…. I just.

He truly is peak white liberalism.