The acid test of personal integrity is whether you can maintain your principles instead of unthinkingly joining a herd and accepting all its ideas. Max Boot, the most radical of the Never Trumpers, has failed that test miserably.
He started out opposing Trump on national security grounds and is now raving about "white privilege".
In college — this was in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley — I used to be one of those smart-alecky young conservatives who would scoff at the notion of “white male privilege” and claim that anyone propagating such concepts was guilty of “political correctness.”
Now Max Boot has been reeducated. He has seen the light. He has learned to love Big Brother. He realizes his old past foolishness.
I felt it was ridiculous to expect me to atone for the sins of slavery and segregation, to say nothing of the household drudgery and workplace discrimination suffered by women. I wasn’t racist or sexist. (Or so I thought.) I hadn’t discriminated against anyone. (Or so I thought.)
Ah the reeducation has taken hold. Now Max Boot is learning the codes of his new tribe. And confessing his sins. It's a sordid political ritual.
I have concluded that my beliefs were based more on faith than on a critical examination of the evidence.
The evidence actually shows that Boot's emotional political shift had far more to do with it. He's being ideologically, rather than intellectually, consistent.
This doesn’t meant that I agree with America’s harshest critics — successors to the New Left of the 1960s who saw this country as an irredeemably fascist state that they called “AmeriKKKa.”
Give it a year. When you have ideological affiliations, but no principles, it's only a matter of time.
I realized how entrenched this problem remains when an African-American friend — a well-educated, well-paid, well-dressed woman — confessed that she did not want to walk into a department store carrying in her purse a pair of jeans that she planned to give to a friend later in the day. Why not? Because she was afraid that she would be accused of shoplifting! This is not something that would occur to me, simply because the same suspicion would not attach to a middle-aged, middle-class white man.
I must suffer from oppression too, because I wouldn't do something that stupid either. Apparently only Max Boot would. Maybe he suffers from Max Boot Privilege.
Trump even tried to delegitimize the first African-American president by claiming he wasn’t born in this country, and now he goes after African-American football players who kneel during the playing of the anthem to protest police brutality
So now Max Boot stands with black nationalists against the National Anthem. Give him a year and he'll be denouncing Amerikkka with the rest of his leftist comrades.