A problem I see: Everyone wants to be an activist these days. It’s the new hotness.

I don’t know how it became in vogue, but so many people these days want to have a Rosa Parks moment. They want to have a Selma moment.

They like to play the victim because it gives them the opportunity to be a strong activist. So much so that they’ll even make things up or stage hoaxes to have their moment. Being a victim and standing strong is like activist street cred.

It’s why Bubba Wallace doubled down after the FBI concluded that he wasn’t a target of a hate crime. Secretly, he enjoyed his victim status. It gave him an opportunity to stand strong. Being the target was activist street cred. He didn’t want to let that go. So he doubled down in a last-ditch effort to keep his street cred intact.

How this kind of phenomenon came to be, I don’t know. But I think it’s quite clear that being an aggrieved activist is an identity for a lot of young people the same way there were groups of goths or jocks in high school.

I also have a theory that a lot of this “social justice” stuff is simply filling the void left by people not being as religious these days. Humans have an innate need to believe in something righteous. That traditionally has been religion. As religion has grown less popular in the West, social justice is there to fill the void. Social Justice is a new religion.