Posted on by Bonald

We all dread the day when our employing institution gets that fateful email.

Hi, I’m a reporter with the Stasi Times, and I’m preparing an article on how you tolerate hateful bigots like your employee [insert your name] whose offensive writings we have found [wherever]. Would you mind answering a few questions?

We’d like some way to maximize the chance of coming out of it with job, or at least future employability, intact. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a lot one can do ahead of time. At least, none of the strategies I had once considered are of much use.

Make yourself indispensable to your employer. Make it so he can’t afford to fire you.

It took a long time for me to get it through my head that the incentives of management have very little to do with the profits or proper functioning of the company. Even if the company will promptly go out of business if you are fired, it is still personally advantageous for your boss/administrator to fire you rather than be known as having sheltered a bigot, putting the vulgar interests of shareholders, customers, students, etc. before righteousness. The latter would hinder him in getting his next job.

Don’t write anything that sounds bad in isolation. Make sure each sentence absent any context is either inoffensive (if only because unintelligible), manifestly reasonable, or effectively puts into question liberal assumptions that our rulers wish to have regarded as indisputable, perhaps even as unarticulated background assumptions.

Writing clearly and carefully is inherently good, but avoiding saying things that sound mean or lower-class or hateful never saved anyone from vilification. The media is under no constraint to report your beliefs accurately or fairly. They don’t have to quote you and won’t if they don’t find something they can embarrass you with. They don’t have to link or add citations to your actual writings. The actual tone of your writing will do nothing to prevent it from being labeled a “screed”, and no amount of information you cite will keep you from being labeled “ignorant”.

I’m probably not the only conservative who started writing because I falsely believed that I could argue antiliberal positions much more cogently than had been done before. Although I thought myself skeptical of mainstream sources, I accepted their characterization of their ideological opponents more than I realized. In fact, the cases for patriarchy, established churches, monarchy, and ethnic homogeneity had been made brilliantly several times in the past. It didn’t matter. If you dissent, you will only be remembered, if at all, as another ignorant bigot.

For the same reason, the media faces no danger of inadvertently drawing attention to your ideas by exposing you. Your actual ideas will not be reported.

Get contractual guarantees (e.g. tenure)

This is only an option in a few fields, mostly academia, but it once did provide some protection. That protection is rapidly waning. This is the importance of Leftists redefining dissent from their beliefs as not disagreement but as creating a hostile work or learning environment and jeopardizing the safety of minorities. Also, most institutions, especially universities, now define the promotion of “diversity” and “inclusiveness” as core institutional objectives. So, a professor who refuses to affirm progressive dogmas on diversity is analogous to a professor who refuses to teach his classes (or worse, if one accepts the “safety” rhetoric, as a professor who physically attacks his students).

Dox yourself. Write a manifesto, and put your strongest case forward. They’re going to find you eventually, so you might as well try to influence what they try to nail you with.

If the goal is to be a martyr for the cause and never work again, one might try to orchestrate such a thing, contacting sympathetic alternative media ahead of time, and so forth. Realistically, agonizing over the perfectly crafted manifesto won’t lead to a much different outcome than being busted over a quick ill-considered tweet. Remember, the mainstream media is under no constraint to report your beliefs accurately or fairly.

Be boring. Make your writings as academic and abstruse as possible, so that your audience remains small, and if any SPLC or ADL agent does come across your writing, his eyes will glaze over.

This has actually worked for me so far. Of course, it works to the extent that it makes sharing your beliefs as close as possible to not sharing your beliefs.

And it can only work as long as the ruling class isn’t bothering to go after the small fish. Already, social media companies are experimenting with machine learning algorithms trained to detect “hate”. One can imagine a near future in which dissent is detected automatically before it even finds a human reader and its author’s employer contacted to administer punishment (and the employer himself subject to retaliation if appropriate punishment is not administered in a timely fashion).

Bruce is right. Long term, the only dissent that will remain possible will be secret verbal communication between individuals who deeply trust each other.

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