Reihan Salam is of Bangladeshi extraction and went to Harvard, so he is in a position to explain precisely where Sarah Jeong’s animosity toward white men is coming from.

In some instances, white-bashing can actually serve as a means of ascent, especially for Asian Americans. Embracing the culture of upper-white self-flagellation can spur avowedly enlightened whites to eagerly cheer on their Asian American comrades who show (abstract, faceless, numberless) lower-white people what for. And, simultaneously, it allows Asian Americans who use the discourse to position themselves as ethnic outsiders, including those who are comfortably enmeshed in elite circles.

Think about what it takes to claw your way into America’s elite strata. Unless you were born into the upper-middle class, your surest route is to pursue an elite education. To do that, it pays to be exquisitely sensitive to the beliefs and prejudices of the people who hold the power to grant you access to the social and cultural capital you badly want. By setting the standards for what counts as praiseworthy, elite universities have a powerful effect on youthful go-getters. Their admissions decisions represent powerful “nudges” towards certain attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, and I’ve known many first- and second-generation kids—I was one of them—who intuit this early on.

Consider the recent contretemps over Harvard’s undergraduate admissions policies. Critics argue that the university actively discriminates against high-achieving Asian American applicants by claiming that a disproportionately large number of them have lackluster personalities. One obvious reaction to this charge is to denounce Harvard for its supposed double standards. This reaction might be especially appealing to those who see themselves as the sort of people who’d be dismissed by Harvard’s suspect screening process, and who’d thus have every reason to resent it. Viewed through an elite-eye lens, though, this sort of reaction can seem a little gauche. You’re saying, in a sense, that you can’t hack it—you just can’t crack the code. To a successful code-cracker, that could seem more than a little pathetic.

So what if you’re an Asian American who has already made the cut? In that case, you might celebrate Harvard’s wisdom in judiciously balancing its student body, or warn that Harvard’s critics have a darker, more ominous agenda that can’t be trusted. This establishes you as an insider, who gets that Harvard is doing the right thing, while allowing you to distance yourself from less-enlightened, and less-elite, people of Asian origin: You’re all being duped by evil lower-whites who don’t grok racial justice.

And if you’re an Asian American aspiring to make the cut, even with the deck stacked against you, you might eschew complaining in favor of doing everything in your power to cultivate the personal qualities Harvard wants most, or at least to appear to have done so. One straightforward way to demonstrate that you are Harvard material might be to denounce Harvard as racist, provided you’re careful to do so in a way that flatters rather than offends those who run the university and are invested in its continued success. For example, you might reject the notion that affirmative action is the problem while arguing that Harvard shouldn’t endeavor to increase representation of rural and working-class whites, on the spurious grounds that all whites are privileged. That you’ll make these claims even though you yourself are hardly among the most downtrodden is immaterial: The important thing is to be interesting. What better way to demonstrate that you’re not a humdrum worker bee, afflicted with a lackluster personality, than to carefully and selectively express the right kind of righteous indignation?

I certainly don’t mean to single out Harvard. As the senior assistant director of admissions at Yale recently observed, “for those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice. We encourage them to be vocal when they see an opportunity for change in our institution and in the world.” Picture yourself as an eager high schooler reading these words, and then jotting down notes. You absorb, assuming you hadn’t already, what it takes to make your way in contemporary elite America. And as you grow older, you lean into the rhetorical gambits that served you so well in the past. You might even build a worldview out of them.

RTWT

Sarah Jeong

Rising in the national cultural ranks to a seat on the New York Times Editorial Board, despite a lengthy record of statements of bigotry toward white men, gained 30-year-old Sarah Jeong her recent 15-minutes-of-fame, which in turn led to our learning a lot more about her.

Naomi Wu, a Chinese Internet YouTube and Twitter personality, describes how the editorial team at VICE casually endangered her politically in China by gossiping about her private life in flagrant violation of a previous agreement made with her. When she complained about being thrown under bus by a group of hipsters safe in Brooklyn, she got nowhere, so Naomi indulged in a very small bit of animated revenge, flashing the Brooklyn address of the VICE editor who’d done her wrong in a video display on the side of a pair of boots.

VICE responded by getting her YouTube video removed and persuading PATREON, her only possible YouTube pay channel, to terminate her account. They effectively shut off her monthly income stream, closing off her primary creative outlet and sending her back to free-lance coding for international clients.

Additionally, VICE sicced none other than Sarah Jeong on her.

Sarah did not come to listen, mediate, or learn- she was sent… to destroy me and protect a business model that has endangered voiceless sources in the developing World countless times.

Sarah Jeong was educated at Berkeley and Harvard and only an idiot would deny the woman is quite brilliant in her areas of expertise. This has given her a large platform and she is considered the final word in her respective fields by many people. Some of the areas that people look to her are law, Internet harassment, and Asian-American issues. As a journalist- this is her beat, and her word on the subject carries a crushing and near irrefutable weight. …

Her unprovoked attack was devastatingly effective, Western women all over Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and YouTube comments sections reposted about her “insightful Twitter thread” (of course those flocking to these threads had no pre-existing issues with a whorish looking underweight Asian girl and were not in the least bit eager to have me taken down a peg.)

The support I had previously had in getting Vice to limit the story to what had been agreed on, to treat me the same as the countless DIY men they cover without mention of their personal lives, and to having my Patreon account restored- evaporated.

Sarah had won- and she knew it. She’d been trained by the best universities in the World to fight exactly this kind of fight, to win by any means, for right or wrong. She was a trained Special Forces combatant against child. With the platform that journalism gave her amplifying that power, sent on behalf of the exact sort of “privileged White man” she claims to despise, she went out to destroy another Asian woman. All while knowing full well the issue was far more complex than she was pretending, the facts completely different- and simply not caring. Not then, not in the following months when it became clear to more and more people just how badly she had abused her power, her education, her profession, and her privilege.

It took me two months before I could start up again, and then only with sponsorship provided by a Chinese tech company and with more strict limits on what I could post. No more nuanced discussion of tech issues on social media- Tor in China, VPNs as a wealth and class filter, gender equality in Chinese tech, MakeEd training for young women- all off-limits now. My income is half of what it was with Patreon and I am not well-off to begin with. The effect this has had on my life, my content, my standard of living- has been devastating and Sarah played no small part in it that.

RTWT

Sarah may not like white men very much, but she is obviously not what you’d call all that loyal to fellow Asian chicks either.

—————-

Jonah Goldberg, in National Review, thinks that he recognizes Sarah Jeong as a type.

This is a woman who came to America as a young child, got a degree from Berkeley and Harvard Law School, decided not to pursue law and signed up to work for some online start-ups writing about technology. By the time she’s 30, the editorial board of the most prestigious newspaper in America hires her. So of course her defenders insist she’s justified in denouncing the four Ps (the Patriarchy of the Pale Penis People). I mean look how the man has kept her down!

Never mind that there are very few nations where this sort of career path could be replicated, including in Jeong’s native South Korea or many of the supposedly more enlightened Scandinavian utopias we hear so much about these days.

The whole thing is ludicrous, which is why I liked Reihan’s essay on the strategic pose of being an over-achieving anti-white Asian so much. He writes:

Think about what it takes to claw your way into America’s elite strata. Unless you were born into the upper-middle class, your surest route is to pursue an elite education. To do that, it pays to be exquisitely sensitive to the beliefs and prejudices of the people who hold the power to grant you access to the social and cultural capital you badly want. By setting the standards for what counts as praiseworthy, elite universities have a powerful effect on youthful go-getters. Their admissions decisions represent powerful “nudges” towards certain attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, and I’ve known many first- and second-generation kids — I was one of them — who intuit this early on.

…

Schumpeter predicted, before the massive expansion of higher education, that capitalism would breed a new class of intellectuals (writers, journalists, artists, lawyers, etc.) who would be motivated by both ideology and self-interest to undermine liberal democratic capitalism. “Unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest,” Schumpeter wrote in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. He adds a bit further on: “For such an atmosphere [of social hostility to capitalism] to develop it is necessary that there be groups whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it.”

Sarah Jeong is not the ideal example of what Schumpeter was talking about, viz. capitalism (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fits that bill better). But she is a good example of the larger adversary culture that universities not only “nudge” students toward, but actively indoctrinate them into. Simply put, there is an entire industry dedicated to the proposition that not just the American past, but the American present, is disordered, bigoted, and oppressive. And Jeong’s meteoric and meritocratic rise demonstrates how so many of our best and brightest have gotten that message. How many have internalized it as ideology or have just cynically decided that’s how you get ahead is an open question.

RTWT

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Of course, Iowahawk is just joking around, rhetorically hoisting dog-eating Gook girl with her own Intersectional petard. In reality, I expect that he, like Robby Soave at Reason and Jonah Goldberg and Kevin D. Williamson at National Review and I, thinks 1) employers ought to keep their noses out of employees’ social media, 2) the current practice of print-mobbing people out of jobs for crimes against political correctness is outrageous, and 3) we old white men (despite our propensity to sunburn) are just not so thin-skinned as to get all weepy and distressed over a few insulting cracks on Twitter. Old white men are a lot more secure than all that.

The most self-important airhead of them all: Thomas Friedman

Everyone laughed on reading Maureen Dowd’s naive and self-important account of her bad experience and inability to handle the effects produced by nibbling a caramel-flavored candy bar containing marijuana during a recent trip to Denver.

What did these bozos do back when they were at college in the 1970s? we wondered.

MoDo’s hyperbolic account of her horrible ordeal, the paralysis! the paranoia! the disorientation! the failure to maintain, Man! has inspired inquiring minds on the Internet to wonder what would it be like if other self-important, windbag, journalist airheads got stoned.

What if, for instance, his emminence, the New York Times’s own Tom Friedman were to become unaccustomedly wrecked?

Sarah Jeong took on the task of imagining Tom Friedman pulling a Maureen Dowd and produced a masterpiece of satire in the haiku-like-form of a series of Tweets (happily collected at Twitchy).

Via The Dish.