Etymology For Our Times

     The word privilege has been much in the news and the national discourse lately. It’s been propelled mostly by the claims of black racialist mouthpieces, ever eager to stir up interracial animosity, that we whites possess it and blacks don’t. But what does their claim really mean?

     A look at the etymology of the word proves exceptionally revealing:

     privilege n: from Latin privilegium "law applying to one person, bill of law in favor of or against an individual," in the post-Augustine period "an ordinance in favor of an individual, privilege, prerogative," from privus "individual" (see private (adj.)) + lex (genitive legis) "law" (see legal (adj.)). Meaning "advantage granted"

     Thus, to call a person privileged is to say that the public laws do not apply to him – that he is governed by a set of private laws that don’t apply to the rest of us. This also applies to the notion of group privileges, no matter how the group is defined.

     With that as our setting, let’s have a look at today’s most privileged group: those to whom the public laws seemingly do not apply:

     [W]here are the police while these vandals destroy public property and tear down priceless works of art that have stood, in some cases, for a century or more? You almost have to remind yourself that the people tearing down the property actually do not have the legal right to do what they’re doing. You’d be excused for thinking otherwise – does the term “public property” mean that the public can do whatever it wants with it? – however, destruction of property worth more than $500 is a felony in most states. These statues are worth many thousands of dollars, making these mob-led “removals” felony crimes. They are also dangerous crimes, as the man who had his skull cracked open in Virginia convincingly discovered.

     But this has been the theme in recent weeks. The police standby while leftist radicals do, quite literally, whatever they want....

     It seems to me that the greatest privilege on offer in our culture today is the privilege to be utterly immune from the law. This is the privilege exercised by many of the “protesters.” And though some of them are white males, many are not. It is, then, a privilege that is not dispensed based on race, but on ideology. We might call it Leftist Privilege. A person with the “correct” worldview, especially if he is gathered with a group of other correct-thinking people, can do almost anything he wants. The Powers That Be will bend over backwards to accommodate him and meet his demands.

     Now, Matt Walsh calls this Leftist privilege, but it is important to take note of the rationale under which Leftist activists assert this privilege: their claims about “white privilege.” The Left has seized upon the Black Lives Matter racialist cult’s claim that American Negroes are generally oppressed by “structural racism” and is using it for its own, entirely political purposes. And so these vandals and insurrectionists are privileged to commit deeds of destruction and violence for which normal Americans would suffer harsh consequences.

     I can’t imagine how the matter could be made any clearer. There’s much more to be said on the subject, particularly about the hand-wringing paralysis that has afflicted our so-called “leaders” in the face of what’s so obviously an insurrection against the legal order, but now is not the time.

     It is time to recognize that it’s not law-abiding white Americans who have the privileged position here.

     There’s no point in trying to argue this point to any Left-inclined person. They’re insusceptible to facts and reasoning. Their agenda requires that they be deaf to all rational argument, and they regard their agenda as supreme above all other things, even if they’re incapable of expressing it plainly. (Cf. Eric Hoffer’s “fact-proof screen.”) But if you have generally decent relatives, friends, or acquaintances who are moved to any degree by the Left’s claims about “white privilege” and “structural racism,” you might want to try Matt Walsh’s reasoning on them. It’s simple and clear. It certainly doesn’t require a convoluted deductive or inductive argument or a deep acquaintance with the law.

     You might mention, as an aside, that the Left’s racialist perversion of the concept of justice is directly responsible for the creation of the burgeoning white identity movement, but consider it the advanced course in racial sociodynamics: not appropriate for dilettantes or those unwilling to do the necessary reading.