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Privilege Lost Isn’t Oppression — It’s Justice
At the height of the Summer of Floyd, while American cities burned and Kendi and DiAngelo topped the best-seller list, Black Lives Matter activists developed a pithy response to anyone who dared object to the movement’s blatant anti-white animus.
“When you’re accustomed to privilege,” they said, “equality feels like oppression.” In other words, members of the so-called oppressor class (white, straight, conservative, Christian, American males) should accept treatment they perceive as unfair because that’s the only way to correct the unfair advantages they’ve come to take for granted.
Now, it looks like the shoe is on the other foot.
NPR posted a story on April 29 warning that “Trump has used government powers to target more than 100 perceived enemies.” The author hyperventilates about the president “targeting political opponents, news organizations, former government officials, universities, international student protesters and law firms” and “using a vast array of government powers to launch criminal investigations, sweep people into ICE detention, ban companies from receiving federal contracts, revoke security clearances and fire employees.”
In fact, all Trump is doing is attempting to restore equality, fairness, and accountability to institutions that liberals have long dominated — sometimes for decades.
NPR, for example, clearly feels entitled to the millions in taxpayer funds it receives, despite being so fanatically left-wing that it literally broadcast an abortion on the radio. Defunding NPR might require rocking the boat a little. It might even qualify as using “government powers” to target “perceived enemies.” (RELATED: Uncle Sam Just Conducted Its Final April 15th Pledge Drive for PBS and NPR)
But this theory only makes sense if you accept what philosophers call the is-ought fallacy — the idea that the way things currently work is the way they should work. Consider the situation objectively, and it’s obvious that convincing elite white liberals to hate half the country is an unjust use of Americans’ tax dollars. Republicans are under no obligation to keep this gravy train running.
The same pattern plays out across society.
Trump’s deportation policies seem extreme only because they’re a response to decades of immigration anarchy (especially under former President Joe Biden). The liberals demanding “due process” in the removal of 15 million illegals said nothing when Biden constructed absurd legal loopholes in the form of the CHNV protocol, expanded Temporary Protected Status, and the CBP One app to allow millions of people into the U.S. with hardly any process at all.
Liberal privilege means taking it for granted that laws you don’t like can be circumvented or simply ignored. But thanks to Trump, that time has passed.
The same goes for the Department of Justice.
Under Biden, the Justice Department undertook an unprecedented campaign of lawfare. The FBI spied on pro-life groups, conservative Catholics, and parents who didn’t want their elementary-age kids learning about sodomy. But that same corrupt Biden FBI let pro-abortion mobs vandalize churches, torch crisis pregnancy centers, and terrorize Supreme Court justices — at their homes — with impunity.
Biden’s regulators attacked targeted businesses, too, like RealPage, whose algorithmic pricing software merely gave homeowners and landlords real-time information about local marketplace conditions. Yet, the Biden DOJ laughably blamed the software for the administration’s housing inflation. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board put it, “What’s really going on here is an attempt to distract voters from frustration over the Biden Administration’s inflationary policies.” (RELATED: Saving Us From Scheming Landlords? Biden DOJ Sues Real Estate Tech Company RealPage)
Special Counsel Jack Smith (with the help of prestigious law firms that have also become liberal fiefdoms) prosecuted Trump himself for having classified documents at his residence, but let Biden off the hook for doing the exact same thing.
Liberals acted as if playing politics like this was simply the DOJ’s proper function. Not anymore.
Since Day One, President Trump has begun the long-overdue work of cleaning house. The Biden-era left-wing lawyers who thought their job was to act as ideological enforcers have been shown the door. In their place are prosecutors focused on policing actual crime — not pronouns, not parental speech, not “anti-racism” training manuals. The new mandate is simple — restore law and order. No more targeting conservatives for thoughtcrime while Antifa walks free. No more pretending that enforcing immigration law is racist. No more turning the DOJ into the Democrats’ personal political action committee.
Trump isn’t “politicizing” the Justice Department — he’s de-politicizing it. And that’s exactly what terrifies the radicals.
The Democrats and their allies have also come to count on their total control of higher education, calling President Trump names for working to reform it.
Liberals vastly outnumber conservatives among professors, and whole administrative departments exist solely to push left-wing ideology. Right-leaning students self-censor at alarming rates. Whites and Asians are passed over in favor of less-qualified applicants from more “favored” races. Conservative speakers get blacklisted or shouted down while Hamas sympathizers terrorize Jewish students with impunity.
But when Trump declared that Harvard (where the ratio of liberal to conservative professors is 80:1) was no longer serving the public interest and must either change its policies or forfeit its tax-exempt status and nearly $2 billion in federal funds, the school’s administration denounced him as a tyrant. (RELATED: The Fall of Harvard: How America’s Oldest University Became Its Most Expensive Liability)
Talk about privilege. It’s like watching a 16-year-old girl scream “I hate you, Dad!” out the window of the BMW he bought her.
This is especially ironic given that Trump is merely applying an already existing legal precedent. In 1983, the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, a Christian college in South Carolina, over the institution’s ban on interracial dating. What, exactly, is different this time? Is it that Bob Jones was perceived to be a bunch of “rubes” and Harvard is … well, Harvard? Or is it that anti-black racism is bad, but anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-Jewish racism are admirable?
Trump’s DOGE-led purges of the federal bureaucracy only appear extreme if you accept that liberals have some inalienable right to operate a taxpayer-funded patronage system of global left-wing indoctrination.
I could go on.
Why is it outrageous for Trump to revoke Biden’s security clearance due to Biden’s obvious senility, but not for Biden to revoke Trump’s out of pure malice?
Why should retired members of the intelligence community keep receiving classified briefings after they helped steal a presidential election by lying about Hunter Biden’s laptop?
Why is X a threat to democracy when it lets everyone post freely, but Twitter wasn’t when its moderators colluded with the FBI to make it a left-wing echo chamber and heavily censored right-wing accounts, including my own?
Why is it a bridge too far when Trump bans companies with DEI policies from receiving federal contracts, but not when every president from LBJ to Biden forces federal contractors to practice affirmative action?
Why does it count as “politicizing” the Kennedy Center or the Holocaust Museum when Trump fires a bunch of Democrat operatives from their boards, but not when Democrats appointed those same lackeys in the first place?
Liberal privilege means assuming that your views are normative, that they have a right to govern every institution of society, and that anyone who dissents from those views deserves whatever they get. Now that Trump is challenging those assumptions, the persecutors think they’re being persecuted.
If this administration’s actions seem drastic, it’s because decisive action is needed to dismantle liberal institutional capture and restore actual equality, neutrality, and accountability in this country. If liberals experience that as oppression, then so be it.
READ MORE from Steve Cortes:
Trump Is Dismantling Biden’s Blame-Game Bureaucracy
Steve Cortes is president of the League of American Workers, a populist right pro-laborer advocacy group, and senior political advisor to Catholic Vote. He is a former senior advisor to President Trump and JD Vance, plus a former commentator for Fox News and CNN.
The post Privilege Lost Isn’t Oppression — It’s Justice appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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