Jim Goad - The New Church Ladies: The Extremely Uptight World of Social Justice

First Edition: Published by Obnoxious Books, Stone Mountain, GA.

ISBN-10: 0-692-84721-9

Book title inspired by Jack Donovan.

Cover illustration from the personal collection of Garth Holt.

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior righteous indignationthis is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C. S. Lewis

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. Ones standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Theodore Dalrymple

Social-justice warriors, assemble! Im about to deliver a sermon.

Back in the 1980sin that Pre-Cambrian era before many of you were even swimming in your dads scrotumDana Carvey on Saturday Night Live did a recurring character called The Church Lady. It was a spot-on parody of a tight-assed, hyper-moralistic Christian woman who was constantly lecturing and demeaning others for their sins.

Now, I dont like Christians any more than you do. But that doesnt mean Im on your team. As neither a Christian nor a progressive nor a millennial, I have something that most of you lackperspective. You and the Christians are both wrong about everything, and yet you both feel compelled to constantly prove how wrong you are in public.

Although many of you openly mock Christianity and feel you embody its polar opposite, you are incorrect. You are the New Church Ladies.

The sacred secular script you followcultural progressivism, egalitarianism, social justice, or whatever the fuck youre calling it these daysis simply Christianity with God removed. Your Godyour untouchable premiseis the naively childish and entirely unscientific notion of innate human equality. The moralism and the sanctimony and the witch-hunting and the baseless assumptions are exactly the same. Just because your philosophy is different doesnt mean your psychology is. Your self-righteous mob mentality and communal bloodlust to scapegoat all heretics and burn them at the stake is identical.

Just like church ladies, you have your sinsinstead of masturbation and adultery and heresy, theyre racism, sexism, and homophobia. You arent sexually repressedyoure ideologically repressed. You still play with your little Angel and Devil figurines just like the Christians do. You flip the characters, but its the same tired script.

Like the church ladies of yore, you gasp in horror and treat anything that deviates from your Holy Script as blasphemy. You cant bear the idea that people who think differently than you do are allowed to exist. Hence your endless campaigns to shame, silence, and get anyone who deviates from the script fired from their jobs and banished from polite society. Your drive to control and silence all opposition is a religious impulse, not a logical one.

Your thinking is that of a mob, and your shrieking moralism is in many ways indistinguishable to that of fundamentalist Christians. Doesnt your arm get tired from holding that torch all the time?

Shut this down. Erase this. Flag this. This makes me uncomfortable. Give it a trigger warning. This is problematic. Why are you giving this shit a forum? This shit shouldnt exist. Whoever wrote this shit should die. My feelings are hurt. This shit makes me sick. Its disgusting. Im crying. Give me a pill. Im calling the cops.

While lecturing me that I walk around with an invisible knapsack of privilege, you walk around with an invisible butt plug of sanctimony. You have moral rectitude lodged firmly up your rectum. You inhabit a collectivist world of zombie meme-regurgitators for whom individualism seems to have become a curse word.

And you implausibly and deceptively label all opposition as fear rather than mere disagreement. Hence your insatiable habit to name and shame a new -phobia every week. Theres a difference between disliking something and being afraid of it, one that flies way over your pious heads.

Justice is simply a dishonest word for revenge. Despite your pretenses of love and compassion, your every word and action reveals you are filled with hatea dishonest hate. I dont have a problem with hate. I hate a lot of things. I love to hate. But its the dishonesty that makes me wish I could vomit in all your faces at once.

Despite the fact that you posture as people who help the little guy, you are backed by the media and the government and the education-industrial complex. You arent fighting the power; you are the tools of power. I can tell where you got fed everything that comes out of your mouth.

Heres the difference between people like me and you: You want to hang me; I dont want to hang out with you. Seems as if my approach is less truly hateful and far less intrusive.

But there you go again, dictating whats funny and whats satire and whats acceptable and whats not. Who the fuck died and left you Pope?

Youre wound so tightly, I can hear you squeaking. For fucks sake, how self-righteous and hypocritical do you have to get before the mass of us who arent nearly so self-righteous stand up and start shouting back? The supposedly intolerant people have been way too tolerant of your endless tantrums.

You are ALWAYS getting offended. You spend every waking momentand possibly most of your dream lifeoffended. Jesus Christ, I remember when the younguns were the LAST to get offended, but now youre the most easily offended people on the fucking planet. Get a grip, you little totalitarians, or the backlash is going to give you diaper rash.

As I type this from my heavily black neighborhood, I hark back to my wigger days and recall something that Chuck D from black-nationalist rap group Public Enemy said to me wearily when I interviewed him back in 1990:

You tell people what you are, and people still dont believe you.