Agreeing With Statists For The Wrong Reasons: Anti-Discrimination Laws
In the latter half of the 20th century, governments throughout the West passed legislation that forbids discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, and other such factors. The mainstream narrative says that the market failed to protect people from evil bigots, so the state had to step in to save these poor minorities. The truth, as usual, is that the state caused this problem. This was done by legally requiring business owners to deny service to certain types of people, officially segregating urban communities and public services, and teaching children a bigoted curriculum in government schools. While it would have sufficed to simply repeal all laws that mandated bigotry and segregation, statists will never let an opportunity to seize more control over people’s lives and liberties go to waste. The end result was that they kept violating private property rights and freedom of association, but inverted the purpose.
Given the ugliness of historical bigotry, the popular ignorance of historical truth, the backlash received by anyone who openly supports the rights of private property owners to exclude people, and the continued indoctrination of new generations with cultural Marxism, eliminating anti-discrimination laws by straightforward means is all but politically impossible. Fortunately for people who care about liberty and correctly understand it, there is another way. Let us consider the alternative method of not only agreeing with statists for the wrong reasons, but of amplifying and accelerating their laws all the way to their destruction.
In order to destroy an enemy properly, one must first understand that enemy. Contrary to popular belief, anti-discrimination laws inherently persecute the majority, for if discrimination occurred (or was at least thought to occur) randomly, no one would find them to be necessary. Those who support such laws must therefore build them on foundational beliefs in white supremacy, institutionalized misogyny, etc. Words such as ‘racism’ and ‘sexism,’ which once had clearly defined meanings, become corrupted to associate a present political opponent with a hated enemy from the past and weaponized to identify targets to punish with enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. More skillful linguistic warriors have invented new words such as ‘homophobia’ and ‘transphobia’ to further demonize majorities and non-deviants. Over time, leftist activists come to believe their own nonsense and fall into a holiness spiral that results in the social justice warriors that plague college campuses today.
When these rhetorical weapons are aimed at businesses, a lucrative shakedown scheme emerges. Businesses can be sued for discrimination, and civil court proceedings are effectively rigged against them. The standard is preponderance of the evidence (50 percent plus 1) rather than beyond a reasonable doubt (>99 percent), and the defendants are being asked to prove a negative. Actually attempting to prove this negative is usually an inexhaustible proof by exhaustion which will require more resources than settling with the plaintiffs, so fiduciary responsibility to shareholders of the business necessitates the latter response. Thus, leftist activists acquire vast sums of money and employment as diversity officers in human resource departments.
This has what many people would charitably call unintended consequences, but the well-informed need not be so charitable. For the aforementioned reasons, no one can mount an effective challenge to anti-discrimination through legislative reversal or civil disobedience. But just like any other behavior that statists seek to ban, making a behavior illegal forces it underground instead of eliminating it. Once discrimination is outlawed, only outlaws will directly discriminate, but others will continue to discriminate while cloaking their actions behind a standard that is legally permissible. An employer who does not want to hire women or a baker who does not want to cater to a gay wedding will instead say that an employee is unqualified or that the bakery is too busy to bake the cake. Over time, virtues such as education, experience, and industriousness will take on a bigoted connotation and thus lose status. Moreover, the positive aspects of discrimination in terms of having standards will disappear from the culture, causing the proliferation of stupidity, incompetence, ugliness, and all manner of criminal and degenerate behavior.
Anti-discrimination laws, like most other leftist instruments, are written in nice universalist language without reference to any specific groups of people. This is done to deceive both the traditional majority populations who would otherwise call out their subversiveness and the individualists who would otherwise call out their authoritarian collectivism. But as explained above, their actual use is always to oppose majority populations as well as those who have traditionally held power. The question, then, is how to awaken the majority populations and individualists to what the left is doing. The answer is twofold. First, pass what would appear to be redundant legislation, given the aforementioned universalist language. Explicitly protect whites, heterosexuals, Christians, and cisgendered people with an anti-discrimination law. Moderate leftists will complain that these are redundant and be shown to be wrong when the enforcement of these protections has had time to take effect. Radical leftists will protest the new law, saying that it is unacceptable to have any legal protections for whites, heterosexuals, Christians, and cisgendered people. If the reaction of social justice warriors to the tame idea of papering college campuses with signs that say “It’s OK to be white” is any indication, this bait will be impossible for them to resist. Their responses will clearly demonstrate both their hostility to these groups and their authoritarian collectivism.
The second part is to expand anti-discrimination laws to cover political beliefs, employment status, and any other category that can be imagined. The idea is that if everyone is special, then no one is special. If every group is a protected class, then no group is more protected than any other. From that point, the case can be made to remove all of the anti-discrimination laws in order to bring private property rights, freedom of association, honest labor relations, and the ability to have standards back into the economy. Opposing any changes from truly universal anti-discrimination would be political suicide for elected officials, as the businesses that donate to their campaigns would be clamoring for the lifting of such damaging laws. Anyone who seeks to return to the recent status quo ante could be demonized as bigoted against the majority population, who would be newly awakened to the leftist strategy.
It goes without saying that this will be very destructive in the short-term. However, the long-term goals of eliminating anti-discrimination laws and informing the left that powers they create will be used against them are well worth the momentary cost. The political impossibility of simply repealing such laws makes it necessary to agree with statists for the wrong reasons on the issue of discrimination.
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