Claire Fox isn’t the first person many would go to for their life philosophy. The Brit’s wiki page opens with a very weird description:

Claire Regina Fox (born 5 June 1960 in Barton-upon-Irwell, Greater Manchester) is a British libertarian writer. She is the director and founder of the think tank the Institute of Ideas and a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

For many, the “libertarian” thing would be enough. Add to it the Revolutionary Communist Party and we’re pretty deep into tin-foil hat territory. So take Terry Murray’s review of her book, I find that offensive, with a grain of salt.

Fox recalls how before the corpses of the Charlie Hebdo journalists had even grown cold, many who had initially defended the principle of free expression had U-turned to denouncing as inflammatory and offensive the cartoons that catalysed the incident, implying that the Hebdostaff were themselves to blame for the violence they suffered. So low has the tolerance bar fallen that one no longer has even to be conscious of her own ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘cissexism’ or ‘Islamophobia’ in order to be guilty of these thought crimes.

‘Microaggressions theory’ has sprung up to diagnose your unconscious bias, and to legitimise victims’ feelings of being macro-aggrieved. Hate-speech legislation, such as in Britain, only bolsters this imbalance of power between victim and perpetrator, by defining ‘hate speech’ as any speech that someone claims is racist, etc, irrespective of the speaker’s intentions or the context of his speech.

Who needs blasphemy law when we’ve got the freewheeling, arbitrary, and unlimited redefinition of terms such as ‘racism’? So broad now is the scope of the term it could feasibly apply to just about anything touching on race. This is particularly worrying because, if racism can mean everything, then it ceases to mean anything. Anti-racism should be a vivid, living ethic, not a dead dogma that we unthinkingly apply more promiscuously than a two-peckered billy goat.*

Whether you take this as thoughtful, outrageous or the ramblings of a blind squirrel, there is an important point in there, that when everything is racist or sexist, then it ceases to mean anything.

And, of course, because she agrees with me, she’s brilliant.

Over the past few years, words have consistently become untethered by definition, and the list grows daily. Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography was once deemed an intellectual failure. He’s now become the inspiration of the social justice masses, who share his mad feelz.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Jacobellis v. Ohio, Stewart, concurring.

What is racist, sexist, any other -ist or any variation of words infused with social justice condemnation, like “oppression,” “maginalized” or “minoritized,” eludes any meaningful parameters. They are whatever someone says they are, or as is more likely the case, whatever someone screams at you for doing horrifyingly and traumatizingly wrong.

Years ago, I asked a prawf why the feminist lawprofs, who were cutting edge at the time but have since become so banal, even reactionary, as to be too tepid to bother with, looked under every rock in search of offense. Why, I wondered, do they want to be offended? It seemed to me like such a miserable way to go through life, always seeking a reason to be angry and outraged.

Achieving prominence, success and recognition the old way was difficult. It meant you had to work hard, strive for expertise and excellence, and even if you did, there was no assurance that you would gain the acclaim you craved. And this was so unfair, since everyone was entitled to their moment of fame, just for being. Aren’t you special just the way you are?

Victimhood, on the other hand, offered the perfect path to adoration, and lots of Facebook likes, without any effort at all. Plus, it had the added advantage of equalizing opportunity for renown for those who were not nearly as callipygian as Kardashian or snarky as Hitchens. So what if you can’t sing or dance, write a sonnet like Bill or play guitar like Eric. You too can be the victim of racism or sexism.

And this is where Claire Fox gets it colorfully wrong:

Anti-racism should be a vivid, living ethic, not a dead dogma that we unthinkingly apply more promiscuously than a two-peckered billy goat.

A two-peckered goat has, at least, the virtue of being unique. Cries of racism and sexism, whether as lunge, parry or riposte, are not only meaningless for their lack of definition, but don’t even sting anymore because of their ubiquity. That fighting real racism, real sexism, should be a societal goal wouldn’t be controversial for any sentient person, but for the fact that nobody knows what the words mean anymore.

The irony is that social justice has managed to devalue its own weapons while failing miserably to accomplish the goal of devaluing the pain of racist epithets. Then again, Lenny Bruce was a two-peckered goat, which is why some still remember his point today. But that’s so much harder than being a victim.

*Paragraph broken up because it’s too damn long.