Rod Thomson

It’s strange but true: One of the greatest advantages you can now possess in America is to be a card-carrying member of an officially disadvantaged group — race, gender, gender preference.

It’s the intersectionality imbroglio in operation in daily life, where there are only the innocent oppressed and the evil oppressor. The oppressor is white men, and all other categories possess varying degrees of oppressed, grievance authority.

This holds true from racial preferences in hiring and college admissions to legal protections and extra status in society. It’s not at all as the personal liberty-minded framers envisioned things. They wanted people to have the same protections from government; freedom to succeed or fail, fly or crash, coast and be middling, as they please. No guarantees. No equal outcomes. Just equality under the law and from government tyranny.

It has been the most fabulous of experiments, while it has lasted. A nation like no other before or since. And it has lasted a long time. Whether it will continue depends largely on the majority’s will and ability to turn the ship. Because the direction we are currently on will end in servitude to the state. Ask George Orwell.

And this may be nowhere more clear than in the intersectionality philosophy where you have rights apportioned based on race, ethnicity, gender, and LGBTness.

Some examples backed by data should make your head nod in understanding. (There is also income, disability and religion categories among others, but these are the big three.)

Gay power

Without doubt, gays are the most powerful special interest group in the country, particularly when looked at pound for pound. Relatively speaking, there just aren’t that many. Yet they continue to win on every single issue they fight, bar none. Even issues until very recently considered preposterous, they have won on.

Good grief, they have their own marriage laws!

And yet in the intersectional grievance pyramid, they score highly for being disadvantaged, oppressed and discriminated against — even while being the wealthiest of all demographics and powerful enough to move mountains in Washington and Hollywood. It’s laughable when you think about it. But also not good, because like the other whiners in the pyramid, they use government as a weapon against those who disagree with them.

Pretty much like every tyrant ever.

Woman power

So women are “oppressed” because they aren’t proportionally represented in every industry and because we haven’t had a woman president yet (although that has not stopped blacks from being “oppressed.”)

Of course, the data just crushes any concept of women being oppressed in America.

For instance, women are dominating high school and college graduation rates, and this is across race and ethnicity. Interestingly, Hispanic women actually graduate from high school at a higher rate than white women (76-72 percent) — which totally screws up the intersectionality pyramid. But whatever, this whole post is about how social justice warriors are totally indifferent to facts.

The college student ratio nationally is now 55 percent female and 45 percent male and continuing to widen. Not much oppression to be seen here.

But what about the gender pay gap? It’s political agenda nonsense, and provable with data.

While men’s real earnings (median earnings for full-time workers, adjusted for inflation) has declined during the past 44 years, women’s real earnings have increased steadily — even including time off for childbirth and raising.

It is within a few thousand dollars per year now, depending on how measured, and if maternity leave and career pauses for child-rearing are removed it is essentially even.

Further, in major metro areas where single men and women in their 20s have similar degrees or training and jobs — women make more. From Time magazine:

“…according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group.”

The entire farce about the gender pay gap is due to women’s choices to have children and spend at least some time raising them. Without that, professional women are actually doing better than men.

Zero oppression.

Black and Hispanic power

Hispanics continue to integrate into the American dream (freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness — create a better life for future generations). It’s worth noting that they graduate from high school at a higher rate than whites.

On earnings, whites still out-earn Hispanics by a substantial margin, but a large part of that is due to the inclusion of millions of largely uneducated and unskilled illegal immigrants. Political correctness generally does not allow researchers to find out if a Hispanic is an American citizen or not.

Blacks continue to do the worst in educational attainment and earnings. This, of course, is a huge problem. But it is important to point out that it is driven by black men, not women, who really pull things down. That does not show up in the working blacks data, where men earn slightly more than women, but is revealed in the high dropout rate among black men and therefore high unemployment rate.

Remember this truism of individual choice that applies across race and gender, courtesy of the left-leaning Brookings Institute. Three simple choices are necessary to avoid poverty: graduate from high school, don’t have children until married, get a job. That’s it. Regardless of race or gender, individual choice is what drives the disparities.

But blacks and Hispanics who make good choices get the extra advantages of lowered standards for college admission and better job opportunities through hiring quotas (they aren’t called that, but they are that.) Those race-based advantages cannot overcome the poor choices set out by the Brookings Institute, but they do help a great deal those making good choices — at the expense of the official “oppressors” making the same good choices.

Actually, the only demographic not making any progress by these measurable standards: white men. That is not the narrative you will ever see in the media, Hollywood or academia.

All three of these grievance divisions — by race, gender and gender preference — are promulgations of leftist orthodoxy.

And while this has been and continues to be hugely damaging to America, it may also seed the destruction of the Democratic Party coalition and of modern liberalism. We’ll report on that in our next post.

Rod Thomson is an author, TV talking head and former journalist, and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act.