JONAH GOLDBERG ON THE ZERO-SUM THINKING BEHIND GROUP RIGHTS:

I am making a moral point rather than a political or geopolitical one. Nation-states, for example, can hold grievances against other nation-states on all sorts of issues. It is right for Armenians to demand an apology from Turkey for the Armenian genocide, even if it was long ago.

But at the ground level, intergenerational guilt is one of the oldest and nastiest bigotries, because it is among the most natural. For much of human history, people were born into communities that were in large part defined by their hatred for other communities.

We see it all over the place on the issue of race. Some argue that white people today should carry some of the guilt for slavery. Never mind that many white people today are descended from people who: did not immigrate here until after slavery ended, were not slaveholders in the first place, were not considered “white” when they moved here, etc.

But, as much as I find such arguments unpersuasive and often ludicrous, I can at least understand them on an emotional level.

I can’t quite get my head around the idea that men today should suffer or be treated unjustly to make amends for how men, now long dead, treated women, now long dead.

And yet, this is now the very definition of a woke take.

Someone get Matt a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird stat!

Read the whole thing. Though to be fair, in today’s environment, there’s always the risk that Dowd would view Atticus Finch as “American literature’s most celebrated rape apologist.”

Related: Screw due process: Ron Fournier says to “stop the whataboutism and defend every woman.”

As Jamie Kirchick of Tablet tweets, “It’s been very revealing this week to see some of the loudest voices in the ‘protect norms’ crowd suddenly dispense with the norm of presumed innocence.”