SJWs Always Lie

by Vox Day

  James Watson: apology and result.

  James D. Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel prize for deciphering the double-helix of DNA, apologized “unreservedly” yesterday for comments reported this week suggesting that black people, over all, are not as intelligent as whites… Late yesterday, the board of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research institution in New York, issued a statement saying it was suspending the administrative responsibilities of Dr. Watson as chancellor “pending further deliberation.”

  —“Nobel Winner Issues Apology for Comments About Blacks”, Cordelia Dean, The New York Times, 19 October 2007

  James Watson, the world-famous biologist who was shunned by the scientific community after linking intelligence to race, said he is selling his Nobel Prize because he is short of money after being made a pariah. Mr Watson said his income had plummeted following his controversial remarks in 2007, which forced him to retire from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York… “Because I was an ‘unperson’ I was fired from the boards of companies, so I have no income, apart from my academic income,” he said.

  —“James Watson selling Nobel prize”, Keith Perry, The Telegraph, 28 November 2014

  Brandon Eich: apology and result.

  I am deeply honored and humbled by the CEO role. I’m also grateful for the messages of support. At the same time, I know there are concerns about my commitment to fostering equality and welcome for LGBT individuals at Mozilla. I hope to lay those concerns to rest, first by making a set of commitments to you. More important, I want to lay them to rest by actions and results. A number of Mozillians, including LGBT individuals and allies, have stepped forward to offer guidance and assistance in this. I cannot thank you enough, and I ask for your ongoing help to make Mozilla a place of equality and welcome for all. Here are my commitments, and here’s what you can expect:

  Active commitment to equality in everything we do, from employment to events to community-building.

  Working with LGBT communities and allies, to listen and learn what does and doesn’t make Mozilla supportive and welcoming.

  My ongoing commitment to our Community Participation Guidelines, our inclusive health benefits, our anti-discrimination policies, and the spirit that underlies all of these.

  My personal commitment to work on new initiatives to reach out to those who feel excluded or who have been marginalized in ways that makes their contributing to Mozilla and to open source difficult.

  I know some will be skeptical about this, and that words alone will not change anything. I can only ask for your support to have the time to “show, not tell”; and in the meantime express my sorrow at having caused pain.

  —“Inclusiveness at Mozilla”, Brendan Eich, brendaneich.com, 26 March 2014

  Call me crazy, but I was looking for an unconditional apology from Eich, as well as a substantial monetary donation as a show of contrition.

  —Russell Beattie ‏(@RussB), 27 March 2014

  Eich was apparently pushed out by the board… Though Eich apologized for causing “pain” and insisted he could separate his personal views from the way he ran the company, that didn’t wash with the board.

  —“Mozilla's Brendan Eich: Persecutor Or Persecuted?”, Susan Adams, Forbes, 4 April 2014

  Sir Tim Hunt: apology and result.

  The Nobel laureate Tim Hunt has apologised for comments he made about female scientists. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday, Hunt apologised for any offence, saying he meant the remarks to be humorous – but added he “did mean the part about having trouble with girls”.

  The Royal Society distanced itself from Hunt’s comments. It said: “The Royal Society believes that in order to achieve everything that it can, science needs to make the best use of the research capabilities of the entire population. “Too many talented individuals do not fulfil their scientific potential because of issues such as gender and the society is committed to helping to put this right. Sir Tim Hunt was speaking as an individual and his reported comments in no way reflect the views of the Royal Society.”

  —“Tim Hunt apologises for comments on his 'trouble' with female scientists ”, Jamie Grierson, The Guardian, 10 June 2015

  After intense criticism for undeniably sexist comments he made about female scientists, Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt offered up an apology that really only made him look worse.

  —“Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt Under Fire For Sexist Comments”, Abigail Tracy, Forbes, 10 June 10, 2015

  In a statement published on its website UCL said that it could confirm that Hunt had resigned on Wednesday from his position as honorary professor with the UCL Faculty of Life Sciences, “following comments he made about women in science at the World Conference of Science Journalists on 9 June”. It added: “UCL was the first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men, and the university believes that this outcome is compatible with our commitment to gender equality.”

  —“Nobel laureate Tim Hunt resigns after 'trouble with girls' comments”, Ben Quinn, The Guardian, June 11 2015

  Watson's apology could not have been more abject. Eich's sincerity and abasement before the thought police could not have been more genuine or more groveling. Hunt's apology could not have come more quickly. Yet none of them proved sufficient to even marginally reduce the amount of social pressure the SJWs continued to bring to bear on them, pressure that none of them proved able to successfully withstand.

  STAGE FIVE: Press for Surrender

  Once the apology has been duly offered, and rejected, ignored, or transformed into a prosecutorial brief, the SJWs promptly begin to close for the kill. In most cases, the true-believing SJWs are not in a position to directly enforce their will. While those who are in positions of executive authority at corporations, universities, and other influential organizations are usually sympathetic to the SJW Narrative, and duly recite the organization's commitment to diversity, equality, tolerance, vibrancy, feminism, and whatever other dogmas the SJWs have managed to slip into the organization's code of conduct, they are seldom outright SJWs and they are often caught nearly as off-guard by the manufactured outrage as the target himself.

  This is more true in the corporate world and in the church than in academia or government agencies, where decades of affirmative action, institutional leftward bias, and the lack of objective performance metrics have rendered the decision-makers hypersensitive to the demands of their most problematic underlings. That's why a schoolteacher or even a school principal is much more likely to be fired for a much less egregious violation of the Narrative than a corporate employee or a pastor. In fact, in many state and local governments, you are far more likely to be fired for violating the Narrative than you are for never coming in to work at all, especially if you are a member of one of the Narrative-protected classes. Crying “discrimination” to a mid-level manager at a state government agency is more effective than throwing garlic-infused holy water in the face of a vampire.

  But in most organizations, firing someone involves a fair amount of tedious paperwork, as well as an amount of evidence documenting unprofessional behavior in the workplace. Since in most places “violating the Narrative” is only a firing offense in SJW minds, and since some perception of people being free to do and say what they want in their off-hours still persists, the SJWs know that for all their massed outrage and social pressure, actually getting someone fired is usually a difficult, lengthy, and uncertain process.

  That is the primary reason why they always push very hard for the individual to voluntarily resign. There is a secondary reason too; if the target resigns, the SJWs can wash their hands of any responsibility for the resignation and pretend that the whole affair was merely a private, personal decision on the part of the successfully executed target, a decision that had nothing whatsoever to do with the social pressure to which he'd just been subjected. SJWs are like a firing squad that offers its blindfolded victim a loaded pistol, and then, after a single gunshot ring
s out, walks away pretending that the victim committed suicide for reasons that no one could possibly know.

  Remember, SJWs always lie. Consider the crocodile tears of the SJW who led the initial charge against Brendan Eich, tears he shed only after the Mozilla board pressured the CEO into resigning.

  I want to say how absolutely sad to hear that Brendan Eich stepped down. I guess this counts as some kind of “victory,” but it doesn’t feel like it. We never expected this to get as big as it has and we never expected that Brendan wouldn’t make a simple statement. I met with Brendan and asked him to just apologize for the discrimination under the law that we faced. He can still keep his personal beliefs, but I wanted him to recognize that we faced real issues with immigration and say that he never intended to cause people problems. It’s heartbreaking to us that he was unwilling to say even that.

  —“A Sad 'Victory'”, Hampton Catlin, Rarebit, 3 April 2014

  Mark Surman, the head of the Mozilla Foundation, which appoints and is responsible for the Mozilla Board that forced Eich to resign, similarly attempted to wash his hands of the matter. No doubt he was influenced in this regard by the 47,491 messages, most of them highly negative, that inundated Mozilla in response to Eich's resignation.

  As I look at the world’s reaction to all this, I want to clarify… Brendan Eich was not fired. He struggled to connect and empathize with people who both respect him and felt hurt. He also got beat up. We all tried to protect him and help him get around these challenges until the very last hours. But, ultimately, I think Brendan found it impossible to lead under these circumstances. It was his choice to step down.

  Notice how the focus is placed on the “choice” to step down, never mind the intense social pressure being placed on him by the very SJWs who profess to be sad after they achieve their objective and acquire the scalp they are seeking.

  And Surman was right to be concerned about the public's reaction to the Mozilla CEO's forced resignation, which is why he tried to dissemble. Mozilla Firefox's user base was already in decline before SJW attack on Eich, and it declined even more precipitously in the months that followed. While Connie St. Louis's reaction to being asked about taking down a Nobel Laureate was different, note that she similarly attempted to decline any responsibility for the knife sticking out of her victim's back.

  Asked yesterday if she regretted Sir Tim losing his job, the lecturer in science journalism replied: ‘I’ve no regrets about breaking a journalistic story. This is about journalism. Secondly it’s about women in science. My intention was not for him to lose anything. But he didn’t lose anything. He resigned.’

  —“Lecturer who revealed Sir Tim Hunt's 'sexist' comments says she has no regrets about costing the Nobel Prize winner his job”, Colin Fernandez, The Daily Mail, 25 June 2014

  Perhaps “wiping the fingerprints off the murder weapon” would be a better way to describe the final aspect of the fifth stage of an SJW attack, but regardless, the lesson is clear. Forcing a resignation is an SJW's primary objective and ideal victory condition, whether they see fit to feign regret and sorrow in the aftermath or not.

  STAGE SIX: Appeal to Amenable Authority

  Of course, not everyone is taken completely off-guard by an SJW attack. In my case, I'd been repeatedly attacked by the SJWs in SFWA for a period of 8 years before I slipped up and gave them just enough ammunition to take the intensity of their attacks to a new level. In like manner, and despite being one of the magazine's more popular and intelligent contributors for over a decade, John Derbyshire had long been viewed as something of a loose cannon by the editors at National Review for his failure to abide consistently by the SJW Narrative there. While National Review is a nominally conservative magazine and often criticizes political correctness, its editors are generally far to the left of its readers and its contributors alike, and they have been known to engage in an amount of thought-policing, especially when it comes to racial matters or the subject of Israel.

  On April 4, 2012, Derbyshire published a piece on Taki's Magazine called “The Talk: Nonblack Version”. It was little more than an advice piece for white and Asian parents to give to their children mirroring the hypothetical talk some black columnists claimed black parents were giving their children to warn them about the potentially lethal racism of whites following the much-publicized death of Trayvon Martin.

  As you'd expect, the SJWs promptly attacked, with calm and thoughtful articles such as “Racist John Derbyshire Writes Most Racist Article Possible, Pegged to Trayvon Martin Case” on Gawker, “National Review writer ignites firestorm over 'disgusting rant' on race” in The Guardian, “How to succeed in racism without really trying: John Derbyshire tells his children to stay away from black people” in The New York Daily News, “John Derbyshire’s Advice on How to Talk to Your Children About Black People” in The Observer, “National Review Writer Tops Racism With More Racism” on ThinkProgress and “National Review's John Derbyshire Pens Racist Screed: 'Avoid Concentrations Of Blacks,' 'Stay Out Of' Their Neighborhoods” on The Huffington Post.

  What was interesting about literally all of these articles was the particular stress that they placed on the fact that John Derbyshire was a writer for National Review. Some of them, including a few that directly referred to National Review in the title, did not even mention the fact that the article that so egregiously violated the Narrative was written for Taki's Magazine, not National Review.

  The reason for this otherwise inexplicable anomaly is easily understood once you grasp that the purpose of an SJW attack is to destroy the career of the target. John Derbyshire is an experienced, tough-minded veteran commentator who has survived many a critical attack. Taki, the publisher of the magazine named after him, is a wealthy iconoclast who is neither susceptible to social media pressure nor subject to the need to appease corporate advertisers. The SJWs attacking Derbyshire knew perfectly well that the man who once played a thug in Bruce Lee's Return of the Dragon wasn't about to burst into tears and resign simply because he faced a hailstorm of SJW outrage. They also knew that Taki was considerably more likely to laugh at them and give Derbyshire a raise, then sprout angel's wings and ascend to the peak of Mount Olympus, than give in to their demands to fire him.

  But National Review was a considerably softer target. It was already somewhat notorious on the political right for its periodic purges, having previously purged Joe Sobran, its former editor, in 1993, another former editor, Peter Brimelow, in 1997, and Ann Coulter, the popular conservative columnist, in 2001. It was no accident that the SJWs attacking Derbyshire went out of their way to use the Taki article to link National Review and racism together; they know that media conservatives have historically been frightened to death about labeled as racist and are willing to do nearly anything to avoid being accused of the dread r-word. And, indeed, various National Review editors and writers nearly tripped over each other in their rush to be the first to denounce Derbyshire.

  Editor Rich Lowry criticized Derbyshire's “appalling view of what parents supposedly should tell their kids about blacks” while Ramesh Ponnuru publicly distanced himself from Derbyshire on Twitter. Jonah Goldberg, who, ironically enough, is well-known for his national bestseller entitled Liberal Fascism, declared, “I find my colleague John Derbyshire's piece fundamentally indefensible and offensive. I wish he hadn't written it.”

  Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for the SJWs to crack National Review. Only four days after the piece was published, Rich Lowry released a prim and cowardly statement purging NR's long-time contributor in a mendacious manner worthy of an SJW.

  Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he's a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, 'Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,' or any one of his 'Straggler' columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We ne
ver would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we'd never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It's a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.

  Thus emboldened, SJWs were inspired to increase the pressure and managed to claim the scalp of a second NR contributor, University of Illinois professor emeritus Robert Weissberg, just three days later. They even took a crack at long-time National Review editor-at-large John O'Sullivan, CBE and former special adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but sanity prevailed. The purges were not ended, however, as Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts fired NR's most popular writer, Mark Steyn, two years later, in 2014.

  Frankly, it's a wonder anyone still reads National Review, as the talent they've purged over the years is considerably more impressive than the sum total of the talent they've retained. The important thing to learn from the Derbyshire purging, however, is that SJWs will always appeal to the most amenable authority rather than the most relevant or the most obvious. They will always aim for the weakest support and focus their malicious efforts there.

  STAGE SEVEN: Show Trial

  In Stalin's Soviet Union, it was common for the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD, to arrest people, put them on public trial for crimes that were mostly fictional, then execute them. In just two years, 1.5 million people were arrested and 681,692 were executed. The NKVD could be remarkably creative in this regard; in one famous case, they invented a political party with a name taken from a science fiction novel written by Alexander V. Chayanov, the “Labour Peasant Party”, then put Chayanov and others on trial for belonging to the criminal and non-existent party!