Young, White, attractive, and destined to inherit incredible wealth from her grandfather, Memphis entrepreneur Joseph Orgill, Eliza Fletcher must have seemed to her murderer the very epitome of White Privilege, the fundamental target relentlessly reviled by the contemporary Left. Jogging alone, as she was accustomed to do, in the early hours of Friday, Sept. 2, she was kidnapped and, the evidence would suggest, ultimately killed by 38 year old Black man Cleotha Abston-Henderson.
The title of this blog is “the politics of hate” because the Marxist vision of history informing the contemporary Left entails the grossly simplistic assumption that all disparities in the material condition of the species are the result of injustice rather than the relative merits of those involved. To her killer, Eliza was just another White, privileged bitch, though in fact she was a good person who, the evidence shows, lovingly taught kindergarten though she need not have done so at all.
I have no doubt whatsoever that the flames of the loathing Abston-Henderson felt for Fletcher were significantly fanned by the narrative that has come to dominate, overtly or implicitly, our “progressive” culture, the ludicrous notion that the success of Western Man had nothing to do with genuine achievement, that the successful of any society always succeed by oppressing the poor, indeed that the benefits of their success are merely a matter of “privilege.” No doubt the Inequality which he had heard denounced a thousand times as a moral abomination was on our killer’s mind as he stocked the perfectly innocent Ms. Fletcher.
The Left’s informing narrative fans the flames of Hatred and Resentment, yet those who endorse it spend much of their time sanctimoniously denouncing as “hateful” any opinion not in line with their simplistic world-view. Of course they have no other choice, the merits of Intelligence, Reason and Ingenuity having been abandoned as White, Western, Patriarchal tools of oppression.
Truly absurd!