Manufacturing Intolerance

Daniel Greenfield

By now everyone knows that Dayna Morales, the lesbian waitress who claimed to have been denied a tip over her sexual orientation, was lying. It’s not the first politically correct receipt hoax and it won’t be the last.

Morales’ hoax is a blip in the larger pattern of faked hate crimes. Bigotry is the witch hunt of the modern Salem and progressive witch hunters are just as careless about facts and evidence. Now as then, the goal is to stamp out an attitude and a cultural threat, rather than to enforce the law, and that leads inevitably to the entire tawdry parade of hysterical denunciations and moral panic.


But what is behind this need to manufacture intolerance? When your only real identity is the hatred of others then it is that hatred which keeps you going. An identity built around victimhood needs constant fresh injections of oppression to sustain its existence.

Those African-Americans who define “blackness” not in terms of positive values but in terms of negative values, need white racism to remind them of who they are. And the same holds true for other oppressed minorities who define themselves not by their values; but by their resentments.
Intolerance has become identity. If you define your minority identity on the left’s terms, then if you aren’t being oppressed, you aren’t real. And if you constantly read accounts about other members of your group being discriminated against and those experiences don’t match yours; you begin to wonder if something isn’t wrong with you. If maybe you aren’t really an authentic member of the group.
There are two ways out of this intellectual trap; either by recognizing that an identity need not be based on a sense of persecution or becoming “creative” about finding new forms of persecution.
Professional victimhood has led to the proliferation of fake Indians like Elizabeth Warren and Ward Churchill in the United States and white aborigines in Australia. These fake indigenous tribals have little in the way of a genetic or cultural connection to any native people; but choose to trade in their white identity, at least temporarily, to enhance their leftist politics.
They are engaging in a fraud much bigger than a forged receipt; but they are doing it for the same reasons.
It’s easy to mock Dayna Morales for forging a receipt. If only she had learned about critical race theory, she would have been able to denounce the family in question for their privilege. Dayna only forged a single receipt. Obama spent five years in the White House forging phony racism accusations to protect him on every issue from the economy to ObamaCare.
The left’s need for victimization means that tolerance actually leads to escalating confrontations with these manufacturers of intolerance.

The manufacturers of intolerance, whether they’re tenured academics like Ward Churchill, professional politicians like Barack Obama or angry waitresses like Dayna Morales, respond to tolerance with further provocations. Their goal is to elicit evidence of intolerance to sustain their political identity. The more tolerance they encounter, the more they escalate their provocations.
Their goal is not a tolerant society. It’s not a multiracial society or a post-racial society. It is a society perpetually at war over identity politics. That conflict is what gives them power.
Tolerance provokes them by challenging their identity as members in good standing of the legion of the officially oppressed. Being accepted insults the entire basis for their identity. Schizophrenics experience the discontinuity between the real world and the distorted world in their heads as elementally threatening. The left likewise reacts with paranoia to any claim that the United States has become a more tolerant nation.
Their political schizophrenia is unable to accept America as it is. Instead they are obsessed with seeing it as the bigoted country that they experience inside their own heads. Paranoid schizophrenics manufacture things to be paranoid about. Identity politics manufactures its own illusory bigotries.
The schizophrenic Two Americas of liberals are the America that really exists and the hateful cartoon of it that they draw inside their own heads, depict in movies, scrawl into hateful articles and broadcast on television networks.
Liberals claim to want a better America; but they reject it at every turn. Their cynicism even poisons what should have been their greatest triumphs.
Obama’s victory was an opportunity for healing and unity. Even many Republicans cheered his inauguration; but liberals rejected the gift that Americans were giving and instead doubled down. Racism became their response to everything. Now every week brings another editorial accusing skeptics of government health care of being the new Confederacy.

This ugly behavior was as inevitable as that forged receipt. The left derives its purpose from doling out social justice. If racism were gone, it would have to find a new reason to justify its existence. It had to go through that once when class warfare imploded under the pressure of American prosperity. It isn’t about to begin searching for a substitute for the racial tensions it manufactures.

Beyond the community organizers, the academics and the political hacks who feed off that hatred are the millions of Americans who have not only unknowingly swallowed their dogma, but who have built entire identities around that sense of insecurity and oppression. These people are driven to manufacture intolerance because it defines who they are. They need it to live.

The left has dumped millions of Americans into this shadowy world where they have no positive reason for existing; only a negative one of defying some phantom establishment of patriarchy and some nebulous idea of white privilege.
Wearing chips on their shoulders they seek to provoke the confrontations that give them meaning and when their anger is met with tolerance, they manufacture intolerance with forged receipts, with accusations of white privilege, with fake hate crimes and phony accusations of racism.

It’s a short distance from Dayna Morales forging a receipt to get some money and attention to Barack Obama faking accusations of racism to win a political fight and score another term.