we are blessed to have the word "grifter".

there are a lot of dirty words — and by that I mean messy words, getting the job done but with costs and externalities — that are used to describe identity-sellouts, and this is another dirty word in that sense.

I'll start with the most profane: "house n(ot typing the rest of this word)", which is a deep insult on top of describing a phenomenon; still in use is "uncle tom/aunt thomasina" and various alterations by race/ethnicity. sometimes this is decent enough description of what's going on, but its usage is narrow and describes a person who is selling out their identity upward to a usually-white authority. Candace Owens is described as an Aunt T, but suppose the world powers led her to grift in a similar way to the Chinese regime? this activity is not unlike what many instagram influencers do; it's not "self-hatred", it's being About The Bag.

and yes, it's popular to describe someone as "self-hating" which likely comes from the etymology of "misogyny" and literality with this discourse. someone who "has internalized sexism" rarely has a feeling toward their sex as anything resembling hatred, and as a person who (when it's justified) embraces the emotion of hatred I've always found the term "self-hate" wrong and off.

a lot of people just don't have the constitution to hate certain people. it's exhausting. but, like how alcohol can be a depressant in some and a stimulant in others, it can be an energizing force for action. swap the usual narrative and entertain me — would nazi germany have succeeded in as many of its WWII goals *without* the energizing force of hatred? I doubt it, and the left's 2020 effort against trump certainly wouldn't have been as successful if they were merely lukewarm.

you can replace the agents of action with any political cause you find important, and not only do I embrace justified hatred, I embrace the consequences of someone justifiably hating me; permanent, unfixable differences are a fact of a long life, and much like how a high body count is likelier to be an inevitability of being sexually active into your 30s, so is a higher number of enemies, but unlike sexual activity there are fewer limiters on the potential of the number. there will in other words be many more people who hate Mitt Romney by virtue of the fact that he exists for longer periods of time.

but "hate" has a secondary politicized usage to mean something like "severe discrimination". you can be absent emotion-hate and exercise plenty of political-hate, in the sense of hate speech, hate crimes, whatever — plenty of hate crimes have been committed out of indifference, and hate speech can be reduced to a linguistic formula replicable by AI, and it's absurd to say that an AI using hate speech is "hateful" in the way that a person who hates their childhood bully is "hateful". it's also similarly absurd to say someone "hates" themselves in the way that you "hate" a childhood bully, and it requires a lot of cognitive gymnastics to imagine oneself as an object of hatred in the same way that the Chinese were an object of hatred for the Japanese. per earlier, many people find hate exhausting; it's rare to hear about anyone exhausted from hating themselves, and if so this is usually metaphorical. these secondary usages are not referring to the actual emotion of hate, but some kind way of regarding people.

so as someone who is pro-[the actual emotion], I doubt the extent to which the "hate" in "self-hate" is anything like the "hate" we feel when we truly in our heart of hearts hate someone, and I've always despised the term for its dirtiness at the expense of political convenience.

but, thankfully, "grifter" describes just about every usage we're trying to get at. it's even better than "sellout" in this way, because "sellout" describes a monetary situation. "grifter" doesn't even need to have a monetary relationship; it can describe someone exploiting their situation for clout or status or whatever else. the "fake gamer girl" phenomenon was an unfortunate term that was trying to describe grifters and influencers before these words existed.

I don't, for example, think Candace Owens hates any part of herself, nor do I think she's necessarily subordinating herself. I think a friend's characterization as "about the bag" is dead on — she's apathetic to her inauthenticity. whatever it is she cares about, it's not being true to who she is.

"grifter" describes this better than anything else so far, and unlike "self-hating" or all other inapt verbiage saves us a lot of time and exhaustion arguing over what we're really talking about. entire parts of the pre-covid culture wars could have been avoided if we had it. it's a semantic gift.