I don’t mean “dislike.” I mean: what explains the visceral, seething hatred that now seemingly every good-thinking liberal harbors toward “America’s oldest civil rights organization?”

When you think about it, their hatred doesn’t make a lot of sense. The modern Left has come to be synonymous with a kind of crusading egalitarianism, promising to purge the world of its original sins of racism, sexism, classism, and transphobia, and create a new multicultural utopia where all formerly oppressed peoples live together in love and harmony. It is the philosophy embodied in Stephen Colbert’s hope that there “will be a chance for change” once whites become a minority in America, or that thinks that, if the right people exert the right pressure, Zimbabwe can become a futuristic Wakanda, women can take over all the corporations, and men can give birth. Compared to these lofty goals, worrying about the relative regulatory burdens on gun ownership seems a little technocratic, if not downright boring.

Nor is it at all clear how gun control follows from egalitarian premises. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers all carried guns, allegedly for self-defense in the civil rights clashes of the 1950s and the 60s. And for a movement so concerned about women falling victims to male predation, guns could be a godsend. Star Wars remakes notwithstanding, there is little chance that a woman could fight off a male attacker in hand-to-hand combat. Needless to say, she has a better chance with a gun.

But none of this matters. In recent days, we have seen the NRA called terrorists and child murderers in mainstream outlets. The Left has created a new hate campaign against the NRA rivaled only in its intensity by its campaigns against the alt-right. We have already seen major companies cutting ties to the NRA, in a smaller version of the mass corporate deplatforming that the Right suffered after Charlottesville. If the Left gets its way, associating with the NRA will soon be just as taboo as associating with American Renaissance. But the key question is: why?

Of course, the immediate response is always that liberals just want to end gun violence. To even question their motives will be taken as proof of your own callousness. They only care about the children—don’t you care about the children?

But if leftists are so concerned about violence, then how can we explain their utter indifference to every Muslim terror attack in Europe? European bombings or truck attacks happen with roughly the same frequency as U.S. mass shootings, and involve similar numbers of victims. And invariably, the Left’s reactions are to screech about one, and ignore the other. In London mayor Sadiq Khan’s immortal words, terrorism is just “part and parcel of living in a big city.” It is certainly de rigueur that no progressive person would ever believe that these attacks should lead to thoughts about changing the EU’s immigration policy. On the other hand, every U.S. shooting necessitates an immediate overhaul of all existing gun laws, and if you disagree, the blood of the innocents will stain your soul.

The hypocrisy is too much; concern for crime victims cannot be the explanation. A better explanation might lay in the unique psychology of the Left. From the extermination of the kulaks through the present-day Twitter purges, leftism has always been driven by a totalitarian urge to stomp out anything that conflicted with the leftists’ (obviously unrealistic) moral worldview. But the Second Amendment has always been a sticking point. No matter how many other victories the Left won—from abortion to universal healthcare to gay marriage—they have not been able to significantly damage the Second Amendment. To the contrary, over the past ten years constitutional gun rights have made significant advances through the Supreme Court’s decisions in DC v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, thus handing the Left its first major judicial defeats on hot-button issues in as long as most people can remember. It may be that the totalitarian mindset just cannot handle this holdout, and that the fact that the NRA has fought so successfully just makes liberals hate it all the more.

There is likely a lot of truth to this, but it still ignores the question of why the Left cares so much about this issue in the first place. Sure, they hate losing. But why did they begin the fight?

So we must keep looking. And the deepest answer is uncomfortable, because it involves the most taboo topics of our time. It shows that no matter how much you try to escape it, the twenty-first century’s important issues come back to race.

Whatever its individual flaws, the NRA is far and away the only significant white man’s lobby in Washington. It does not matter that some demographic surveys show that the NRA is not as white as you might think it is. (It is only 60%.) The NRA’s essence is white and is perceived as white by most everyone, Left and Right alike. It is an organization that conjures up images of rural white men, hearkening back to an older America where it was normal for men to hunt and shoot for fun. And the Left has long understood (correctly) that white peoples’ concerns about “crime” or “bad neighborhoods” are just socially acceptable ways of signaling a wariness of blacks. To the extent white men buy guns and join the NRA to “protect their families,” they are statistically most likely to be arming themselves for defense against criminal non-whites. Media Matters has already called the NRA racist for expressing concerns about actual looting. Clearly, the Left sees gun control as a racial issue, even if the respectable Right will not.

You may not be interested in race; but if you are white, your opponents almost certainly are. According to the Huffington Post, non-racism is a form of racism. It is now an accepted fact for much of the Left that white people are inherently racist and that “whiteness” itself is a problem to be overcome. The political Left, the media elites, the major corporations, and the United States government itself all consider “racism” to be the world’s greatest evil and consider fighting for equality their highest goal. Profit-maximizing businesses would rather pour money into SPLC shakedown operations or promote incompetents through affirmative action than be publicly badgered, pressured, bullied, purged, or seen as racist—demonstrating more clearly than this writer ever could where the true power in society lies.

And this, too, is why the NRA must be destroyed. As more than a few wags have commented, America is quickly becoming no country for white men. Sure, the NRA can be goofy. From the perspective of a Moldbug reader, it is tainted by its association with the ‘Murica loving Baby Boomers of the last Bush administration. But it is nonetheless an effective force for the values that built the original America and that our new multicultural overlords insist we must surpass. In a world where even football games become proxy race wars, it is little surprise that the gun control debate becomes racial, too. The NRA is the natural next target.

In the ultimate irony, whatever happens to the NRA, gun violence will likely increase in America. Brazil and Mexico both combine harsh gun control laws with murder rates that leave the United States in the dust—nearly six and four times the U.S .rates, respectively. And their problems are getting worse: in 2017, Mexico had its highest murder rate on record.  As we import more of Brazil and Mexico to this country, we can expect to see the same phenomena here.

But there is a key difference between the violence of Latin America and the white American “gun culture” that the NRA champion. The violence we see in Mexico or Brazil is exactly the kind of violence our elites will enjoy. When people are afraid to walk outside, when the rich retreat to gated communities and everyone else is forced to fend for themselves in the never-ending favela of the New Global Marketplace, social cohesion and community life becomes non-existent. We can only have atomized individuals, struggling on our own, and appealing, with ever-diminishing returns, to an increasingly distant, over-burdened, and corrupt central state. By contrast, the type of culture that the NRA fostered was one that valued strength and independence, where free men were able to defend themselves and their families without the need to appeal to bureaucratic authority. That is one of the greatest blessings of white culture, which found its greatest flowering on the American continent. The fact that this culture—of free, independent, intelligent, and responsible men—inspires such vitriol tells us all we need to know about the world leftists envision.