Dear KMAG: 20190801 Open Topic

I need to post more on privilege rhetoric.
Traditionally communist propaganda relied on envy to sell itself. They’d go up to a farmer (outside the U.S.), look at him, and say to the effect “Hey! Look at you! You’re POOR!!!”. They’d sucker people in through the outrage trap of being jealous of others wealth.
Didn’t work so well in the U.S. Main reason is lots of opportunity, but also a deep abiding American gratitude, which we see on its greatest display during the national holiday of Thanksgiving.
Gratitude and Thanksgiving are the virtues that stand opposite the vice of envy.
Thanksgiving is the kryptonite of leftism. You can’t be a self-absorbed entitled jealous wretch if you are thanking God and your fellow Americans for the things you’ve received in this life.
Envy needs an object to be effective. The old “rich/poor” didn’t work because there was too much wealth in the average American’s hands. So they needed a new object to drive envy with.
The leftist/critical theory concept of “Privilege” is exactly that object. They took an old idea that had positive meaning, and weaponized it by inverting it into a negative meaning.
Remember “Membership has its privileges?” It used to be positive, people understood it. Privilege was something to be GRATEFUL for. It was a privilege to go to college – you were grateful for it. Unlike many of the ungrateful hippies who were privileged to go to college and thought they needed to act ashamed or offended that they had received privilege, ingrates.
“Privilege” stopped being a positive, stopped being something to be grateful, and stopped being a gift with a clear but implied responsibility to serve others with what you have been given – “to whom much is given much is required”. It became something that OTHER people had, that THEY did not get legitimately, something that THEY did not have a right to, something that THEY were hoarding for themselves, something that THEY would not share with you. This was the perfect way to re-engage the ENVY discussion.
(Note: EMPATHY also plays into this – it’s manipulated as a one way street from people who have “privilege” to those who don’t. It’s very effective at playing on people’s do-gooder instinct to manipulate them toward leftist goals. See again – EMPATHY is a good thing that leftists have contorted to serve their own ambitions.)
So now “privilege” can be loaded with whatever freight you want. Need a racial edge? White privilege. Need a religious edge? “Christian” privilege. On it goes. Male Privilege. Cis-gender privilege. Abled privilege.
One of the beauties of “privilege” over the old “rich/poor” divide is that literally ANYTHING can be loaded into “Privlege” with just an adjective. At one point I even found a slide deck from a health training professional talking about “continence privilege”. People who are normally continent don’t go around thinking about their continence privilege, but they still have it.
The left has successfully reloaded the language to “privilege” and eliminated any connection to envy. You can talk all day long about other people’s privilege – which is to say in third wave feminist lingo “b*tching” about other people’s privilege – and you’ll never get called out for being a whiny selfish shill who is jealous and envious of everyone else on the planet but won’t take the personal responsibility necessary to better yourself. They’ll never get called out for the total entitled ingrates that they are. People literally do not know how to counter privilege rhetoric. It’s a weapon that most people don’t understand: Envy disguised under the cloak of unfairness.