My latest in PJ Media:
Failed CNN host and cannibal Reza Aslan raised some eyebrows last Friday when he tweeted: “If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire f**king thing down.”
Criticized for this open call to violence, Aslan doubled down on Monday, tweeting: “Been a few days since I tweeted that if GOP try to jam a SCOTUS thru B4 election we burn the f**king thing down & since the death threats & Breitbart headlines about my tweet have now stopped let me just say that if GOP try to jam SCOTUS through we burn the f**king thing down.”
Yet nothing is much less likely than the prospect of the cosseted Aslan donning a balaclava and going out to set fire to Burger Kings in the name of justice. He is, like many Leftists before him, engaging in revolutionary posturing, or what Tom Wolfe indelibly dubbed “radical chic.”
Radical chic involves the spectacle of wealthy, comfortable elitists donning the garb and aping the rhetoric of radical Leftists (remember John Lennon chanting “Power to the people”), or even engaging in revolutionary theatre. The foremost example is Edward Said, the literature professor whose seminal book Orientalism destroyed Middle East Studies in the United States by portraying even the slightest critical word about Islam or Middle Eastern culture as an exercise in colonialism and racism….
In Aslan’s world, fey and soft-handed pseudo-intellectuals vowing to man the barricades and sexagenarian professors throwing rocks aren’t ridiculous, they’re heroic. They’re the vanguard of the hordes of spoiled children who claim to be oppressed when they aren’t, and who then pretend that they are the ones who are valiantly standing on the front line against the oppressors.
They’re silly and stupid, but they’re also dangerous: Others could heed Aslan’s repeated calls to “burn the f**king thing down” and end up destroying the society that has made it so easy for the likes of Reza Aslan and the late Edward Said to gain wealth and honor and live charmed lives. Aslan is now in the odd position of hoping that no one takes his calls seriously. If they do, he could end up in the smoking ruin of the American society for which he has such contempt, his comfortable life a thing of the past, dead by his own hand.
There is much more. Read the rest here.