I distinctly remember PC when I was in college (30 years ago) as it was just beginning to emerge. Back when D’Souza was not as brazenly political, he wrote a book called Illiberal Education that captured the beginnings of the movement quite well. It was always about power and control. He even predicted the inevitable fracturing within the PC/woke crowd as various groups would jockey for influence and control of the narrative as well as prime victimhood status.
It seems to me that all of this crap, and it is crap, was invented by intellectuals and professors (not always overlapping sets) who deeply desired a way to exert control. It’s a revenge of nerds who feel undervalued in society and seek to invert the order. It’s based in envy and was always destined to create misery and fear and bring out the worst in human nature.
And the ones who aren't women are women wannabes and pretenders. And many of the women, while expressing solidarity with each other, obviously hate being women.
It's not always that way; I played karate for several years and the little guys could always whoop my butt. I put it down to their getting picked on and being True Believers; as a tall guy with long arms, I'd never had too many problems, but these guys were vicious!
I quit after a while; I didn't need the religion, was too busy to practice much, and had an abiding faith in short sticks of firewood ....
Revenge of the nerds? In the end, this is really what this is all about. Look at the misfits who embraced and are lionized by the progressive movement. Adam Schiff was not the football captain and Congressperson Tlaib was hardly the head cheerleader.. Let alone Lori Lightfoot aka Beetlejuice.......
Do not be naive. There is a reason such insanity has taken firm root and it is not the little people, it is the big people. The little people are useful idiots given free reign along with the online and physical mobs such as BLM and antifa. The most powerful people in the Western World use this to bring down all classical liberal and sane values. They reside at the World Economic Forum. The expression of their ideology is in Klaus Schwab's two books. It appears nice and pretty, but it is clearly aimed at the end of Western civilization.
The "little people" will have served their purpose of destruction and eventually be destroyed by the most powerful. And they serve another purpose, to distract all of us from the real center of power. Distraction is a huge part of their strategy. Forget the little people, focus on the most powerful people, from Larry Fink to Bill Gates to George Soros to Klaus Schwab - their German organizer who lives in Switzerland.
Every time I changed jobs, the realtor took us to nice housing developments, and the conversation always went like this: "Does this development have a homowner's association?" "Why, yes! That's what makes it exclusive and keeps home values high!" "Take me somewhere else." "What?! Why?" "Because if I want to work on my cattle trailer in my driveway, I'm going to do that. If I want to spray paint my lathe, milling machine, do welding or other things there, I'm going to do that, too. If I want to park my truck with the cattle trailer attached for a month, I'll do that. I may want to put up a tower for my ham radio antennas, and the last thing I want to do is waylay some sonofabitch with a stick of firewood because he's the HOA president and thought he could use my own money to sue me and get away with it. No, it's better for all involved to locate me on some acreage out in the country."
With that, the realtors' interest begins to wane, as her multi-thousand dollar commission for selling a "doctor's house" vanishes before her very eyes.
Tying this back to the O.P., have you noticed recently that houses are no longer listed with a Master Bedroom? Now it's a "Primary Bedroom" (or for the more exclusive properties, "Primary Suite").
I expect to be in the market in the next few years as we seek exodus from Commiefornia, and I will be informing any potential buyer's agent I am seeking only homes with a large Master Bedroom -- and plenty of land for my slaves. If the agent is still standing then I know I've chosen the right one.
A Renaissance-man acquaintance lives on property which came to his family through his wife's people and comprises about 350 acres of antebellum land, complete with the original wood-frame house and huge open fields.
Although he can build just about anything that involves woodworking, one area where he's weak - and knows it - is in designing mechanisms. Since this Virginia property dates back two hundred years, of course he wanted an authentic "slave watch" on the 25' peak of his freshly-built woodworking/mechanical shop. I was a little puzzled, since he seems bereft of slaves. Then he revealed the purpose.
The top half of the slave watch has to pivot on hinges over to the side, ending upside down, so he can sit there in the perfect darkness of nighttime rural Virginia, drink his rum, and stargaze. My undergraduate training was engineering, so he commissioned me to do the design. I did the calculations and sent him a parts list complete with hydraulic pumps and cylinders, and of course an emergency crank. We should start on it when the cool fall weather arrives.
I wonder if in Virginia, certainly the most blue-leaning state of the former Confederacy, there isn't a movement to level all remaining plantations or any other structures associated with "those" days? After they've pulled down all the statues of white people it would seem a likely next target. Make Mao proud.
so stand the TDSers. The People that keep complaining, fine, but they complain because someone else in Complaining...facts are secondary...gotta laugh.
The woke leaders are those intellectuals and professors who realized they would never become Shakespeare, so they settled with woke topics. They were incapable of being as compelling as Harper Lee, Normal Mailer, Toni Morrison. Heck! They cannot even be as creative as J.K. Rowling, a woman who inspired millions to read. Good for her! As one commenter (Lee) on Common Sense put it: woke is based in envy. The envy is so much so that Shakespeare is a dead white male. (That's the real reason the woke go after Rowling. They envy her fame.). Clever, so very clever of them: those intellectuals who fail to look inward and clearly missed the middle ages portion of their education that dealt with the seven deadly sins. Creating oppressor narratives allowed them to get a foothold into the minds of-the-masses while the woke crowd took dystopian fiction literally and not as a warning. They saw PC as their way to fame. In reality, they are the wormtails (Peter Pettigrews) of Rowling's Harry Potter.
Much of the progressive project is based on retribution (cultural appropriation, equity, DEI in general) and envy (collectivism in general). I feel like our culture is going through an informal version of Truth and Reconciliation like South Africa after Apartheid, and Nazi Germany after the war. It's repellent.
Thanks. They would argue it's based on justice - because all the "structures" that existed before were put in place by straight, white, upper-class men...and "fixing" it means putting equity in front. I argue that equality before law and in culture is the best way forward without creating resentment and backlash.
Fundamentally, woke, authoritarian, collectivism is just ne-Marxism + deonstructionism turned into a big retributive tangle with an American spin.
Spot on Lee. What amazes me is that I have rural friends that have zero problem coming to a city and seeing different things. They appreciate some stuff, but also say hey nice place to visit and I might come again.
The PC/Woke are so narrow minded they would never end up going to anywhere that isn't Martha's Vineyard, Vail, Europe or Palm Springs or name the six other vacation spots that are deemed safe and acceptable to Instagram about.
The lack of diversity for the PC/Woke in experience, limits them to nothing more than Urban/Sub-Urban Hillbillies. They cannot go 5 blocks out of their comfort zone, yet they feel they can judge the world. That is judge the world with an all-out deficiency of understanding or will to explore. Or in other words, an absolute narrow mindedness of life and the human race.
I was a student in the early 90’s as well. The difference is the fear. We had the dour feminists activists with their paper petitions you were asked to sign complaining about everything - but you were allowed to ignore or argue with them. I distinctly remember one professor giving an ‘apology’ for using traditional marriage stereotypes to discuss an issue. His apology essentially turned into a lecture that you little activist twits don’t understand ()$(&&) about the real world where these are the scenarios that play out 99% of the time. He was correct of course - but I think the same professor saying the same thing today would be cancelled. What has really happened is that the unhappy weirdos and losers all became university professors and have replicated themselves via expanded university attendance in programs for not very bright students (something something gender something studies). At some point they had the critical mass to take over. The numbers needed are lower than you think - less than 19%. I also think traditional sensible professors got old, stopped caring, and couldn’t be bothered pushing back. The result is they’ve lost their institutions and we may lose our society.
I remember that D'Souza book--he was making interesting, reasonable points then. He remarked on his inability, as a teenager new to an American high school, on his inability to tell white people apart, joked about inviting one girl to the prom and then mistaking another girl for her. But I don't know about revenge of the nerds. I tend to think all this foolishness is a combination of misplaced guilt, mass hysteria and fear.
I own "The Official Politically Correct Handbook!" Though I'd be hard-pressed to track it down on my overflowing bookshelves.
The complete lack of humor is really what distinguishes Woke culture to me.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to many Woke political and cultural stances, just like I'm not entirely unsympathetic to many more—uh? what is anti-Woke? Conservative?—political and cultural stances. I find myself stuck right in the middle, a most unenviable place to be since I can't lay claim to the protective smugness that characterizes either faction.
Back in the 70s, I was a member of something called the Berkeley Women's Feminist Health Collective, and I still remember being widely lambasted at one of the mandatory criticism/self-criticism sessions because I loved wearing makeup.
"Hey, if I were genderless in the primordial ooze, I'd wear makeup," I told them. "I _like_ ornamentation."
None of my castigators so much as cracked a smile.
And that's when I knew that despite my sympathy for many causes on the left, I was in for a rough slog.
'I like ornamentation"...what a perfect view of yourself and such honesty. It's so sad that even back then, your authentic self wasn't ok. That was a telling moment. I hope you are fully adorned with the most beautiful makeup and showing your feminine side. We need more of the feminine who can hold herself in high esteem and be open and caring as well....loved your post!
I love that you call it ornamentation. I think this has been around waaaaay before the 1990s. Aesop wrote about “sour grape-ism” too - if I can’t fit the norms of pretty/cool/athletic, I never wanted it anyway
Thanks for sharing your great line from your Berkeley days: I’m glad it didn’t simply vanish forever as a pearl cast before those commissars. It also reminds me of a line by Eve Babitz in her great, undeservedly obscure and very unWoke book “Slow Days, Fast Company”, commenting on the outcome of a debauched, drug-fueled night in LA: “Passion ornamented by chemistry.”
Patrizia, with all due respect, saying things like "I'm not entirely unsympathetic to many Woke political and cultural stances" is similar to someone saying "maybe Hitler did some things right". There are no genuine "woke" political or cultural stances: it is all using genuine issues for financial or political gain - genocide of the homeless in places like Seattle or LA are good examples.
What we call "woke" is a merger of corporations and faux ideology aimed at preserving corporate power over the society.
"Woke" is at its core anti-human. As such it is anti-culture.
Extremists on both sides of the current political divide are fond of evoking Hitler, of calling the other side fascists. I hear it from my Red Church pals about the Left, and I hear it from my Blue Church pals about the Right.
But fascism has some fairly specific criteria. So I remain unconvinced.
And hopeful that there is a way forward out of the current impasse.
Patrizia, just saying something like "extremists on both sides" would make you an enemy in the "woke" book. Using such phrase at my place of work would cost you your livelihood.
Do you think "woke" are interested in a debate with the almost entire power of global capitalism propping then?
The only way forward is corporations exerting more power over our daily lives, using "woke agenda" as a tool to do so.
And if you think this is just a US issue, ask Sri Lankans or Dutch farmers.
What's going on between you and Patrizia is a discussion or perhaps a debate (between two civilized people). The Woke are not discussing or debating--it's not a national conversation, it's a national negotiation. Negotiations are not about discovering who has the facts or logic on their side, it's about who has the power. And in that sense unfortunately Fielding is correct. We are going to be subjugated to Wokeness, and its very irrationality is what makes it such an efficient loyalty test.
My Mom used to take me to folk concerts when I was pretty small and when she was much more liberal. She always said she was looking forward to them except for the fact she was going to get attitude from all the no-makeup, unwashed hair women in old rumpled clothing who resented her for looking put together! It was true. There were a whole bunch of self-righteous slovenly women giving us the stink-eye.
I remember at Berkeley around 1988 somehow being roped into going to an evening for female students "of color" (yes they even said this back then) to share their artistic talents. My friend was involved in putting this on and was worried not enough people would show up. I was much more flexible with my time back then. So I went. There was a really cool performance by this Indian woman doing the "dance of Shiva" and a few other musical numbers. BUT at the end this woman got up and said she was going to read a poem about how she was half-white half-Mexican and how she always hated her white half and hates her white father who left before she was born. It was a straight out racial diatribe generalizing everything bad about the white race and how she wishes he was dead and that all he means to her is "24 million stinking white sperm." I was pretty taken aback by that. I didn't go to any more "evenings" no matter who invited me.
Clemence it really is the overt expression of self-hate and blame. Again, like most woke expressions she focused on the past, uses personal hatred to stereotype millions, lacks creativity and dishes out blame like an endless PEZ dispenser (PEZ is probably racist too).
This is exactly why it is humorless. There is no humor in rage driven hate, Woke is violent, rage driven and absolutely lacking in creativity or solution-based thinking. Thanks to Instagram and Twitter- everyone will know who these people are across the planet... forever. We just need to wait out their time to 'shine'.
I am very low maintenance, chapstick is my main go to! But I love shoes. My husband calls me Imelda and I take that as the highest compliment I can get.
I don't _like_ the guy, and I didn't care for most of his policies. (Although I _completely_ agreed with him on China, and he doesn't get credit for some really innovative healthcare-related stuff—like making hospital billing more transparent—which I noticed because by training I'm a healthcare economist.)
But it was always clear to me that many of the statements that the Left jumped on as highly egregious were actually _jokes_, which the Left either willfully or stupidly misinterpreted.
Or maybe humor just doesn't translate in politico-speak. 😥
Targeting refugees and travelers from majority-Muslim countries; loosening restrictions on lobbyists; dismantling fiduciary protections for retirement funds; trying to end DACA; obstructing unions; the Tax Cut and Jobs Acts (which actually _incentivized_ offshoring of jobs and profits); not to mention his bizarre response to the COVID crisis—these are things I do not like.
However. I could see the _logic_ behind his policy decisions, so I've never frothed at the mouth over them. I simply disapproved of them. 😀
North Korea is a majority-Muslim country? The restraints were on countries that send terrorists.
The Tax Cut and Jobs Act actually reduced taxes on lower earners and raised them on upperclass earners (because if you earn $1 million and pay $100,000 in property and state income taxes, now only $10,000 can be deducted; which is why only the wealthy states objected).
Nearly everything President Trump said about COVID has proved correct. He included it in his State of the Union speech on February 4, 2020 (and the Democrats accused him of xenophobia). He set up the high level panel in January and blocked entry to the U.S. from China in the same month. He worked with manufacturers to get the needed PPT and ventilators to states that requested them more quickly than expected. He sent fully staffed naval hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles very quickly. He met with key executives to start Operation Warp Speed, which produced vaccines in record time. He noted the benefits of HCQ from a research journal article, one of the safest pharmaceuticals in the world and it was approved by the FDA. He noted the benefits of UV light, which studies in the Russian Academy of Science confirmed (and a new research paper showed that UV light does cut down infection transmission).
He brought in Stanford's Scott Atlas, the country's leading Public Health Policy specialist. Atlas then brought in 3 other leading specialists, hoping to spend 5 minutes with President Trump. The President started asking questions and discussing key issues, and the meeting lasted 45 minutes.
The one problem was that President Trump couldn't fire Birx and Fauci, who were uninformed and constantly making stupid decisions and then announcing bad and inconsistent policies.
Read Atlas's book, "A Plague Upon our Nation". Even read Birx's book, which shows how uneducated she was.
He's not "funny". His rally act has been stale and repetitive since about 2017, and his "comedic riffs" are pretty much an untalented attempt at Rodney Dangerfield style humor, but with little of the "self deprecating" part. Most of his "humor" is actually nasty targeting of his opponents, which also manages to use some pretty lame (and also repetitive) inventory of insults.. "crooked", "stupid", "loser", "small", etc. Not exactly the stuff of clever insult comedy.. he can't even crack a good "yo' mama" joke. What makes Trump "funny" is exactly his willingness to crack on his opponents in a direct manner. Otherwise, I guess I just miss what's so entertaining about listening to him free associate for a few hours. Frankly, I think a lot of his fans lose interest after the first hour too, if you watch the way the crowd gets distracted and starts dwindling at about that point in time..
I can see that you & I would have a spirited and (hopefully) pleasant discussion about these matters should we ever find ourselves in the same bar or riding in adjacent seats on a train! 😀
But in the interests of staying on topic, I'm not gonna respond to your points here—except to say that (a) I'm no fan of Unca Joe Biden's, (b) I totally disagreed with mandatory lockdowns and think Sweden had the best approach to COVID, and (c) _, of course,_ corporations should be taxed!
The essay that has prompted our interesting exchange is about the insanity of political incorrectness. And I think we both agree about _that_! 😀
It's interesting that those arrested and held in the J/6 travesty were, as in many minor drug case's, overcharged, held without bail, forced into plea deals, painted as demonic terrorist's and, as far as I can tell, even though J/6 committee propagandist lie after lie about them was uncovered, no one in media or involved in social justice took up their cause. As in the case of the Russian gulag, once they were swallowed by the regime, they no longer existed. And, though the reality of the part played by "state actors" in formulation of the event is evident, discussion and evidence about their part remains curtained. The plight of Julian Assange only sporadically comes to our attention and he is the in your face object lesson poster child for totalitarianism's war on free speech and journalism. During the Cheney Presidency how many foreign nationals ended up and are still in Gitmo because a resentful informant neighbor wanted to make some quick American war zone cash. Another obvious horror that we overlook, and across the board driver for the entire boondoggle is that incarceration as a big state bureaucratic industry is profitable. If Mussolini's definition is correct the merger of the "state" with "corporate industry" in building, supplying and staffing the now international prison industrial complex is fascism.
You are correct. But, is the actual reality not that J/6 "..should scare everyone.." but that we're trying to accept the the presence of the totalitarian fear, threat and anger already living inside us that is now damaging and subsuming our lives and our Republic?
Can the Republicans save us? I don't know. We've all been gaslit to the point of madness. Maybe the question is: Can we save ourselves?
(Please excuse the rant. Have a great Labor Day!!)
Thank you for sharing your comments here. They have sparked my memory on this rarely talked about situation while stirring some deep feelings in me.
Rarely one to follow politics, until my attention was DEMANDED by the appearance of Trump onto our political stage (horrified at his overly competitive, mean-spirited and disrespectful conduct toward ALL involved), I have spent the past 2 years (with the help of BRAVER ANGELS [www.braverangels.org]) re-educating myself on politics and lending my energies to the HARD WORK of helping to DEPOLARIZE our citizenry for the love of my children, grandchildren and our country as a whole.
I have always been more conservative in my worldview and personal perspectives and, although it was a conflicting process of deep prayer and personal reflection, I voted for Trump despite my dislike of his personal style and inability to “stop while he was ahead”.
2020 came, and still conflicted about Trump’s seeming inability to learn from his mistakes, I could NOT bring myself to vote for the Mob’s candidate.
I wanted the personal right to have a place at the table to talk about my views on the leadership of our country. Without casting my vote, I would have no right at that table. So, as conflicted as I was, Trump was the better of the two.
The left’s vitriolic hatred of Trump, and anyone who dared to cast a vote for him, convinced me that those on the left were even more dangerous than Trump. While I saw Trump fall into bully mode at times, I was witnessing a WHOLE Party falling into the bullying role against one man and anyone who dared be associated with him.
How could that ever instill my confidence in the left as the more thoughtful and mature choice? Working as a MOB, not only against Trump, but conservatives as a whole; people just trying to exercise their right to vote their conscience with the only choices available.
When I think of even the little information that I’ve heard about those caught up in the January 6 Riot, seemingly unfairly jailed for even being present, it literally makes my heart hurt. How can human beings be so unfair for the sake of “making an example”? We should ALL be OUTRAGED❗️ “But for the grace of God go I.”
I choose not to watch TV News on a regular basis, so much of my information comes to me through trusted friends and family or personal reading on trusted platforms such as “Substack”.
I am angry (righteously so, in my estimation) at what has been done to our fellow citizens in the name of partisan politics❗️😞 INJUSTICE is WRONG on both sides of the aisle.
"..engineered psychosis.." I think so. A manufactured theatre of the macabre masking the crippling ineptitude of second rate politicians and their service to avaricious finance. Take any inch of American problem and they add a yard of hysteria and confusion to it. Always crisis. Never solutions. J/6 is a fire for effect psyop. Their entirety of purpose is the prevention of a healthy American national dialogue and to run cover-up for grift and criminality.
“To the extent I allow myself hope, this is my path: speaking the truth as I see it as clearly as I can, and hoping that the populace in general starts waking from this horrible, engineered psychosis. It will take a miracle, but miracles do happen.”
BC...you have the molding and the cornerstone in place. thanks...Trumpty saw what was coming and that is now right before our eyes, with the joke (Jan .6th) compound in place.
As a hair-disadvantaged, melanin-deficient person who is struggling to overcome many severe privileges, I can only ask: Can we please have humor back? Please?
You cannot be deferential, polite, or indirect. The only way the Emperor can continue to show his shiny backside is if the Normals are afraid to point it out, and there are far more of us out there than the Lamestream media would have you believe. It is important that everybody - always - in every venue - say to the Cancel Crowd, "You are full of manure, and I Don't Care About Your Feelings."
I wear my "Save America" hat everywhere, every day. People DO notice, and I've kept a tally of comments. So far, two negative, forty-three positive. It's time to stand up and be counted; nothing less than Everything That Matters depends on it.
You’re so right! You might want to consider buying a Gibson’s Bakery hat, too. I did—and apart from helping an unjustly crushed family victimized by malignant Wokeness, for the same purpose: to stand up and be counted.
I'm driving to Columbus in two weeks to get a hopped-up transmission for my diesel truck, thereafter to Cleveland to visit relatives. Oberlin is right on the way. I'll make it a point to visit Gibson's personally and take home as much stuff as we can eat.
Thanks for the tip on the hat. I'm ordering a couple TODAY so's we can have it when we visit.
On the off-chance that a woke nut confronts me, I plan to use the line Jack Nicholson so deftly delivered in “As Good As It Gets”: “Sell crazy somewhere else. We’re all stocked up here”.
I listened to the podcast on Oberlin and Gibson Bakery. Well done. At the end there was a discussion of how current students of Oberlin continue to boycott the bakery. Although all the facts have been established, students still believe the narratives of previous students whose “own truths” are that the owners of Gibson’s must have been racist. And so a four generation family business with 20+ employees is destroyed. Oberlin continues to refuse to pay even the reduced 25 million penalty. Lawlessness all around.
It’s fun to laugh at books. It’s demoralizing to realize our young people have no sense of decency, no sense of right from wrong. They have swallowed the woke Koolaid served to them by the Oberlins of our country.
The Chinese must be laughing and salivating about the absurdity America is becoming.
It is for my children and grandchildren that I work to make my voice of descent heard because of what I see happening.
At 64 years of age, more life behind me than ahead of me, this is a fight worth fighting for those who will be left after I am gone.
There is no perfection on this earth, but we must fight for what is right and excellent to save our Nation. Imperfect as it might be, it has, in it’s finest moments been a light to our world. By HARD WORK and God’s Grace, we WILL weather this historical challenge and be an even brighter light in the end.
The point at the end is critical. Focus your energies on problems and issues that really matter. Stand strong against woke BS, but remember it is a side show
The major difference between then and now is that leftists and liberals now have real power to fire, cancel, and destroy people for not toeing the ideological line (and if you’re white, being a foot or more behind the line). In the mid 1990s when I was an undergrad, then spending a few years in the workforce before grad school in the early 2000s, leftists were still blue haired communists who wished the USSR had won the Cold War, but had zero power and certainly didn’t run evil capitalist businesses.
By the end of the decade, they had given up the “communist” title and merged with the Democrat and Labor parties via the “third way” of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, with Hillary the Queen of leftism having taken a back seat after the 1994 trouncing that broke 80 years of near total Democrat control of the US legislature. Instead of sticking to Marxist studies or law (and becoming public defenders or low paid ACLU activists), much to my chagrin, they went to business school, computer science programs and the like, not doing particularly well but good enough to get networked with others of their ilk who are now sketching the death camps and purges and permanent lockdown they have power to implement.
I think your comment illustrates the point that British academic Theodore Dalrymple once made:
"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."
When we consider that Wokeness is political correctness writ large, it all begins to make sense. It's probably why Orwell and Solzhenitsyn and the like sound like such prophets of our moment.
100%. I read through your Substack BTW and it’s very good. I’m mulling over starting my own but need to hone a niche that is related to my specialty (data science and strategic metrics) and that could at least be on par with people like you. Thanks for the inspiration from reading your work.
We all thought the craziness in the universities was confined, maybe even amusing, or it's not in the science departments, so how much harm can it do? But now the miseducated generation is in the boardrooms, the media and the funding or regulating agencies and spreading the poison everywhere.
It seems to be based on not calling a thing -- reality-- what it really is. This,
pretty much, used to be called "lying." No one normal, except George Orwell, appears to have foreseen looting as reparations, men as women, or "redefining" raging inflation as no such thing.
The biggest part of this battle is controlling the language. The ‘woke’ claim the moral high ground because they’re ‘not offending anybody’, while systemically offending free thinkers.
This is why standpoint theory is so dangerous. If you are white, you cannot make statements about reparations. If you aren’t transgender, you cannot make statements about what is a man or what is a woman. These aren’t lies anymore. They are based on someone’s “lived experience”, which are not lies but rather “their truth”. The entire concept makes me crazy. Whenever I hear “my truth”, I always mentally substitute “my belief”. Whenever someone tells me I am not allowed to discuss something because of my identity group, I know it is because they are either brainwashed or manipulative. What scares me is that there are fewer and fewer places where I feel comfortable expressing my beliefs, and I have no idea what to do about it.
I would continue to discuss whatever you choose. This is bullying, which feeds on intimidation and lots of mean little tricks. The key word in the tactic you identify is "cannot ." Since this entire ideology is an insult to the intelligence, let's also regress to the playground: "Who says? Who says I can't say it? Why are they more important than I am?" Or anyone else?" If they leave, you'll still have had your say. Just don't let them shut you down. When a colleague said something racist, against whites, she assumed I'd agree- --they always assume that. When I disagreed, she immediately shut down, on a dime. Didn't engage, changed the subject. I finished what I was saying, in full, then moved on. The playground had lots of good stuff. "Here goes nothin'" will pretty much get you through anything
My first encounter with this sociopathic behavior was in the late 80s when a friend brought over a woman who happened to be a lesbian to have coffee in my kitchen. She worked at a male gay bar around the corner and I, a well-traveled "fag-hag" dared ask what it was like for a 'girl' to work in a raunchy male bar.
"GIRL????"""" She intoned indignantly.
I was then told that saying "girl" was NOT OK. She was a WOMAN.
Whatever, I said.
The conversation was shut down and so was the prospect of friendship.
In grad school in the early 90s, my roommate constantly one-upped me with this kind of power play. Aware that I hailed from a middling suburb of Chicago, she -- an Amherst grad and -- I now realize -- a card-carrying narcissist -- was determined to put me in my place, not least because I was enrolled in the more prestigious program (somehow transcending my perceived social class.)
And that's what these jerks are. Classists. Elitists. SNOBS.
The big difference between the 90s and now is the ubiquity of tech. Every "transgression" is filmed and preserved. Every post and every tweet. What a 14 year old posts ( and trust me, I coached them for years and they're hilarious) will come back to haunt him or her when they're a 24 year old job seeker. You can't hide from the thought police and their takeover of the Democrat Party has only emboldened them. We only await the formation of Young Pioneers and we already have the makings of rewarding children for ratting out their parents by the pandemic enforcers. Brave young Hungarians in 1956 threw Molotov Cocktails at tanks to rid themselves of this cancer.
Another big difference in the 90s was that we weren't so race-soaked. Will Smith was a superstar and few cared about his skin color. In Living Color was riotously funny and widely appreciated. Michael Jordan was the King of America - loved by all. Race was an afterthought and it wasn't pandering. Have we made progress? Nope. The "progressives" have regressed us to tribalism and the Sovietization of America.
I'm worried that soon, it will be what a 14-year-old did NOT post that will come back to haunt him when he is 24. Failing to spout the Party Line faithfully and regularly got people in trouble in Orwell's 1984, in the Soviet Union, in Mao's (and Xi's) China, and in Castro's Cuba. Now it's come to our shores.
I agree about tech. I think the other contribution tech has made to this mess is allowing the worst aspects of academia to bleed into the real world. I graduated college in 1995 and the 'power and control' elements that characterize wokeness were very much present on my campus. But it was not overly distressing because there was a sense that it need only be temporarily endured. I believe that social media, especially twitter (look at the rampant academic credentialism and the vitriolic debate about even the most picayune matters there) has played a major role in bringing what was once run of the mill campus absurdity to the mainstream. And that very much includes the cultural marxism that was incubated at universities as the heir to traditional marxism, and that powers woke ideology.
P.S. This article treating the early 1990s as ancient history made me feel really old.
The problem with "woke" is that it proponents take themselves way too seriously; the average man or woman is more concerned with providing for their children and navigating the social hellscape these people have created. At the end of the day, no one gives two shits what they think.
James Lindsay has done a deep dive into this topic. He has many lengthy youtube videos tracing its origins. Cultural Marxism was developed to replace Marxism that had relied on conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. When that didn’t work in America, due to upward mobility, new ways to divide people, and set them at each others’ throats, were needed. New Aggrieved groups vs New Agressors were invented. Subgroups were told how they were oppressed, and by whom. Add to this the moral relativism, the loss of belief in God, which meant the loss of any sense of tolerance, forgiveness, charity, and we have the new religion of wokeism. The new virtuous, entitled to punish the new sinners.
Also, a slick way to lay claim to Marxism while actually subverting it. There's an undercurrent in Marcuse of how those idiot plebes don't understand cultural forces so they need elites to guide them. Very nice sleight of hand, that. Fooled a lot of college students in the last decades of the 20th century, I think.
Interesting essay, a great question is when did the aggression become common place. During the 90's there was such a political balance with the GOP dominating Congress and Clinton in the Whitehouse that censorship and shouts down would have likely been met with condemnations by Democrats themselves lest Gingrich and his ilk use it to expand their gains. But I think the big change was the 2000 election. Winning the popular vote but losing by 500 votes in Florida and the in the courts had a lasting impact. 9/11 temporarily covered that up but then as the Iraq war turned into a quagmire the left rose up and the Dem establishment who in many cases supported the war originally simply fed into an increasing aggression w bush. Add the 2004 defeat followed by Katrina and various Bush scandals and you have an increasingly enraged and progressive party. On top of all this the Internet and the blogs were enable progressives and hardcore leftists to expand their reach. After the bailout in 2008 we had Obama who sold him self as unifier, in practice it was his admin who ended up turning title IX into a weapon against due process and redoing what a women could mean. Trump of course sent them all of the rails as a Hands Maid Tale was obviously around the corner unless progressives resisted! There is so much going on, but having Yale law students shout down opposing speakers and demand censorship does not happen over night, something created that and its not just the PC movement.
That seems an unnecessarily partisan reading of that period. There were calls for censorship by each party. And let’s recall that there was a faction of the GOP that was so enraged at President Clinton who had ended a 12 year run of GOP control of the Executive, that it went so far as to accuse President Clinton and his wife guilty of the “murder” of Vincent Forster ... which has its present day incarnation through Jeffrey Epstein. Then, of course, there was Ken Starr’s special counsel investigation of President Clinton that was so open-ended and directionless in search of a crime (including behind the scenes involvement in certain civil actions brought against President Clinton for his behavior as Arkansas Governor) that, were President Trump to face something remotely similar, the caterwauling would be deafening.
Tip O’Neal memorably observed that “politics ain’t beanbag” and a moment’s consideration of our history going back to its founding should convince everyone that today’s nastiness is nothing new but a longstanding tradition, even if it ebbs and flows in intensity. To try to blame one party is to blind oneself to reality, but then it was ever so.
'...His entire four years in office was nothing but investigation after investigation and attempts to undermine anything he tried to get done.'
Trump tried to get a state certified vote count changed after the fact. I can still hear his voice recorded telephone call now.. That might be worth undermining.
As for Clinton and the lying over his Presidential blow job - that might be construed as impeachment worthy by overzealous Republicans, but as serious as asking the President of another country to provide dirt on your opponent or risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid?
I'll let history (depending on who writes it..) decide that one.
That’s helpful context and correct as far as it goes, but what you’re missing is that the Democratic Party, the East Coast (and now West Coast as well) Establishment, including importantly the pre-Internet media and the rising domestic interference of the Deep State, were outraged at their loss of power under Reagan and determined to both wrest back the levers of power and silence the populist expression of ordinary people (including “Reagan Democrats”) who yearned to preserve the traditional America now in its death throes.
The heart's a funny thing. It has its own set of spark plug wires and it keeps pumping long after the brain is gone if it's sudden. The lack of blood at the scene of such a head wound has always baffled me. I must have missed that day in med school.
Your comparison fails. Unlike the completely unjustified Russia-collusion attacks on Trump which came from the entire Democrat and Academic establishments, supported by 90% of the media, the Republican establishment did not accuse slick Willy and Wicked Hillary of anything criminal made up out of whole cloth.
First, even if the “Republican establishment” - however defined - did not accuse President Clinton of “anything criminal” - itself a debatable proposition, it failed to denounce those that did. Whether that was to honor President Reagan’s so called 11th Commandment of not speaking I’ll of a fellow Republican seems quite irrelevant to the current discussion.
Second, name calling (Slick Willy and Wicked Hillary) adds nothing to the merits of your argument, but it does betray either a profound lack of seriousness or maturity.
You are not serious, mature or honest. Have you denounced the Democrat Establishment for their Trump-Russia collusion fiction which was created by Wicked Hillary. And Slick Willy had numerous sexual relations with Monica which he not only brazenly denied to the nation but lied about under oath.
If you can take the time and re-read my initial comment, it was to call out a partisan view of a history in which, in fact, both parties are equally guilty. The good-bad binary is nothing novel to today, and it acts as an impediment to understanding things - perhaps by design, but everyone has a choice to fall for it or look beyond it.
I am willing to cut you some slack in your response, because sometimes one gets carried away in the heat of the moment reply. But next time, please consider taking a breath before replying and feel free to edit out the ad hominems, they don’t impress or intimidate, let alone convince.
To answer your specific Russiagate question, I discussed it in comments on other pieces and expressed my views there where it was relevant to the matter under discussion. You might be surprised given the assumptions implicit in your last comment.
The parties are not equally guilty. Republicans have never had a leader as corrupt, demented, dishonest, hateful and anti-American asBiden nor anyone a slick as (oral sex isn’t sex) Willie or as objectively evil as Wicked Hillary, the vile creator of Trump-Russia Collusion.
Your right , the post 9/11 gop was happy to degrade domestic opponents and push for censorship. But it’s not republicans today who are the woke but democrats do my comment is heavy on them .
WTF does "degrade domestic opponent and push for censorship" mean, who did it and most importantly - the Patriot Act was and still is, a bipartisan effort.
So I eagerly await your support for the weak attempt at whataboutism in the face of the damning reality that the left, your left that you reflexively and thoughtlessly defend, is the root of PC tyranny...and it is exactly that, tyranny.
I remember Maher driven off tv for saying the Taliban were brave and the the Dixie chicks nonsense as well. I remember wmd skeptics roundly mocked and ridiculed even though they were right. Was 2002's actions as vast as the current purging and cancel culture , certainly not. But the "your with us or against us" mentality surely was there and if it wasn't for the catastrophic handling of the IRAQ war might have stayed.
Again, the Patriot Act, the Iraq War II, Afghanistan, essentially all the post 9/11 tyranny and the media lap-dogging for it was a bipartisan effort (the swamp's effort).
Remember that the TEA Party was a movement from the right to distance themselves from the swamp's righties. This movement eventually begat Trump (and Bernie on the left).
The conservative right constituency is not a warmongering group - war is wasteful (unless you're a profiteer - the swamp (again, they are bipartisan)). It is the swamp and their cronies that benefit from war, not the conservative right constituency.
Maher basically said that the men who flew the jets into the towers weren’t cowards. Evil? Sure. But flying an airplane into a skyscraper, which will guarantee your death, in an act of political defiance ? You can call that a lot of things, but it sure ain’t being chickenshit.
I thought his comment was along the lines that we have cruise missiles but the Taliban weren't chickens. But thanks for the correction , heck it was 20 years ago which is crazy in and of itself.
In the last 2 years I’ve been watching a lot of movies that I was too busy to watch when working. I particularly enjoy movies from the 1940s when I believe we reached our cultural apex. I am surprised by how timeless some of these movies are. I believe the Woke have always been with us. The difference is that they are now in charge and they are doing their best to make a mess of everything. The best example of this is of course Joe Biden, who I am told was elected. My what a devastating criticism of the American people. Those who prefer a leader who is demented over one who is justifiably rude are too stupid for words.
In addition to his open southern border policy and his inflationary spending Biden is so mentally and morally defective he believes that 8 is old enough to decide whether one can have an irreversible sex change operation.
And has any American ever given a speech as unhinged and full of hatred as Biden’s imitation of Hitler in front of Independence Hall? Republicans are the new Jews.
America is in for a world of hurt for the next 27 months, but let’s get one thing clear. Almost all of the support for this grossly incompetent and menacing Administration and all of the attacks on freedom of speech are coming from The Left
Biden is trying to provoke a strong reaction, I’m sure they would love to see some people shooting at democrats.
Trudeau did this last year in canada for the same political calculation.
In the summer he said Canada isn’t the kind of place that forces people to get vaccinations.
Then he was told it was the perfect wedge, he instead demonized such people and called an election a few days later.
When the convoy protest began he publicly labeled everyone involved as fascist, misogynist and racist which of course instantly stirred the pot, making it worse.
Which was the whole point.
90% of Canadians now think canada is on the wrong track, hopefully Biden will provoke the same negative reaction.
Biden & Co clearly gave that speech to urge people to be violent- there’s also talk that this is the prelude to Biden indicting Trump- Biden is running scared, really scared
The only decent comment here today! However, what I find with most posts on this site,is that while everybody does not suffer from TDS the ones that do never offer a solution to our current crisis in Government. We are going downhill quickly we need to stop the rot and turn America around. When the midterms come please vote if you think Brandon is right then vote for him if not then vote them out. The rest doesn’t matter we are all Americans we need America to work for us ALL!
It's all fun and games, until malleable young girls are signing up for double mastectomies, boys for castration and mutilation, and both for carcinogenic hormone therapy. Oh, did I mention mandating an unproven and untested vaccine for toddlers and young children against a virus that poses zero risk to that age group, compared to the horrific risks of autoimmunity and cancer in the coming decades posed by the vaccine? And parents defending children against such abominations are now considered to be child abusers.
These great books are the equivalent of Charlie Chaplin's mocking of The Little Dictator, satisfying but it didn't stop the laughable little monster from leaving 45 million dead, and entire people slaughtered on an industrial scale, Europe in ruins, and millions enslaved under communism.
Coerced speech is thought control and this is all about thought control.
My 12 year old daughter is proudly lesbian, announces it from the treetops, has her own specific rainbow flag, (because there isn’t one there are dozens of color patterns one for each specific identity so they can all be part of their own little tribe) and is all about following pronouns.
From my perspective, it’s like OK but can we wait until you are at least thru puberty? Can you just be a child who does child type things regardless of who you think you are attracted to, and just flush all these identity politics for a few years?
Be a kid for god sakes.
The indoctrination on this and of course CLIMATE EMERGENCY!!! is relentless.
I distinctly remember PC when I was in college (30 years ago) as it was just beginning to emerge. Back when D’Souza was not as brazenly political, he wrote a book called Illiberal Education that captured the beginnings of the movement quite well. It was always about power and control. He even predicted the inevitable fracturing within the PC/woke crowd as various groups would jockey for influence and control of the narrative as well as prime victimhood status.
It seems to me that all of this crap, and it is crap, was invented by intellectuals and professors (not always overlapping sets) who deeply desired a way to exert control. It’s a revenge of nerds who feel undervalued in society and seek to invert the order. It’s based in envy and was always destined to create misery and fear and bring out the worst in human nature.
Give the people that felt alienated in high school a bit of power and they become the bullies they loathed.
My attorney - an old Italian who was so mean that he scared ME - summed it up perfectly: Nothing is as bad as a little man with a little authority.
A little woman with a little authority can be just as bad, in my experience.
Look at the protesters at any event. Majority are women.
And the ones who aren't women are women wannabes and pretenders. And many of the women, while expressing solidarity with each other, obviously hate being women.
Or girly men 😂
I prefer "soy boys"
Or in Chicago's case, a walking-dead woman with a little authority.
This is my life right now! Nailed it!
Sorry, man. Miserable.
It's not always that way; I played karate for several years and the little guys could always whoop my butt. I put it down to their getting picked on and being True Believers; as a tall guy with long arms, I'd never had too many problems, but these guys were vicious!
I quit after a while; I didn't need the religion, was too busy to practice much, and had an abiding faith in short sticks of firewood ....
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to call it sizism or statureism?
You can delete you comment. See three dots.
Revenge of the nerds? In the end, this is really what this is all about. Look at the misfits who embraced and are lionized by the progressive movement. Adam Schiff was not the football captain and Congressperson Tlaib was hardly the head cheerleader.. Let alone Lori Lightfoot aka Beetlejuice.......
Do not be naive. There is a reason such insanity has taken firm root and it is not the little people, it is the big people. The little people are useful idiots given free reign along with the online and physical mobs such as BLM and antifa. The most powerful people in the Western World use this to bring down all classical liberal and sane values. They reside at the World Economic Forum. The expression of their ideology is in Klaus Schwab's two books. It appears nice and pretty, but it is clearly aimed at the end of Western civilization.
The "little people" will have served their purpose of destruction and eventually be destroyed by the most powerful. And they serve another purpose, to distract all of us from the real center of power. Distraction is a huge part of their strategy. Forget the little people, focus on the most powerful people, from Larry Fink to Bill Gates to George Soros to Klaus Schwab - their German organizer who lives in Switzerland.
I do not disagree with you.
So, obviously, you guys have experienced the wrath of Home Owner's Association board members?
Every time I changed jobs, the realtor took us to nice housing developments, and the conversation always went like this: "Does this development have a homowner's association?" "Why, yes! That's what makes it exclusive and keeps home values high!" "Take me somewhere else." "What?! Why?" "Because if I want to work on my cattle trailer in my driveway, I'm going to do that. If I want to spray paint my lathe, milling machine, do welding or other things there, I'm going to do that, too. If I want to park my truck with the cattle trailer attached for a month, I'll do that. I may want to put up a tower for my ham radio antennas, and the last thing I want to do is waylay some sonofabitch with a stick of firewood because he's the HOA president and thought he could use my own money to sue me and get away with it. No, it's better for all involved to locate me on some acreage out in the country."
With that, the realtors' interest begins to wane, as her multi-thousand dollar commission for selling a "doctor's house" vanishes before her very eyes.
Tying this back to the O.P., have you noticed recently that houses are no longer listed with a Master Bedroom? Now it's a "Primary Bedroom" (or for the more exclusive properties, "Primary Suite").
I expect to be in the market in the next few years as we seek exodus from Commiefornia, and I will be informing any potential buyer's agent I am seeking only homes with a large Master Bedroom -- and plenty of land for my slaves. If the agent is still standing then I know I've chosen the right one.
A Renaissance-man acquaintance lives on property which came to his family through his wife's people and comprises about 350 acres of antebellum land, complete with the original wood-frame house and huge open fields.
Although he can build just about anything that involves woodworking, one area where he's weak - and knows it - is in designing mechanisms. Since this Virginia property dates back two hundred years, of course he wanted an authentic "slave watch" on the 25' peak of his freshly-built woodworking/mechanical shop. I was a little puzzled, since he seems bereft of slaves. Then he revealed the purpose.
The top half of the slave watch has to pivot on hinges over to the side, ending upside down, so he can sit there in the perfect darkness of nighttime rural Virginia, drink his rum, and stargaze. My undergraduate training was engineering, so he commissioned me to do the design. I did the calculations and sent him a parts list complete with hydraulic pumps and cylinders, and of course an emergency crank. We should start on it when the cool fall weather arrives.
That's a great story. Thanks for sharing.
I wonder if in Virginia, certainly the most blue-leaning state of the former Confederacy, there isn't a movement to level all remaining plantations or any other structures associated with "those" days? After they've pulled down all the statues of white people it would seem a likely next target. Make Mao proud.
Hey, I live in a doctor's house!
OMG you nailed it. I’m on an HOA board and wow, the triviality and power plays are hilarious on a very micro level.
Middle school never ended.
Remember what Kissinger said about academia: the fights are so bitter because the stakes are so small.
That's a lot of words to say, "Police."
Finally, those who have nothing to contribute to society have found the secret to controlling those whom they have always envied and hated.
Chronic soreheads who have never accomplished anything in life and can't stand it that there are people who have.
so stand the TDSers. The People that keep complaining, fine, but they complain because someone else in Complaining...facts are secondary...gotta laugh.
I think it is a notch more sinister.
How about an entire career with a great union person where only the people who can be fired (not them!) do all the work?
And if anyone opposes that cherry, get them fired immediately.
I suspect this will last about as long as the lobotomy, so, we’ve got 15 more years to go.
The woke leaders are those intellectuals and professors who realized they would never become Shakespeare, so they settled with woke topics. They were incapable of being as compelling as Harper Lee, Normal Mailer, Toni Morrison. Heck! They cannot even be as creative as J.K. Rowling, a woman who inspired millions to read. Good for her! As one commenter (Lee) on Common Sense put it: woke is based in envy. The envy is so much so that Shakespeare is a dead white male. (That's the real reason the woke go after Rowling. They envy her fame.). Clever, so very clever of them: those intellectuals who fail to look inward and clearly missed the middle ages portion of their education that dealt with the seven deadly sins. Creating oppressor narratives allowed them to get a foothold into the minds of-the-masses while the woke crowd took dystopian fiction literally and not as a warning. They saw PC as their way to fame. In reality, they are the wormtails (Peter Pettigrews) of Rowling's Harry Potter.
Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach. Those that won't, criticize.
Much of the progressive project is based on retribution (cultural appropriation, equity, DEI in general) and envy (collectivism in general). I feel like our culture is going through an informal version of Truth and Reconciliation like South Africa after Apartheid, and Nazi Germany after the war. It's repellent.
Interesting... Great food for thought, Ragnar!!
Thanks. They would argue it's based on justice - because all the "structures" that existed before were put in place by straight, white, upper-class men...and "fixing" it means putting equity in front. I argue that equality before law and in culture is the best way forward without creating resentment and backlash.
Fundamentally, woke, authoritarian, collectivism is just ne-Marxism + deonstructionism turned into a big retributive tangle with an American spin.
The professor class are spiteful mutants
Sean...nicely covered. thanks.
Spot on Lee. What amazes me is that I have rural friends that have zero problem coming to a city and seeing different things. They appreciate some stuff, but also say hey nice place to visit and I might come again.
The PC/Woke are so narrow minded they would never end up going to anywhere that isn't Martha's Vineyard, Vail, Europe or Palm Springs or name the six other vacation spots that are deemed safe and acceptable to Instagram about.
The lack of diversity for the PC/Woke in experience, limits them to nothing more than Urban/Sub-Urban Hillbillies. They cannot go 5 blocks out of their comfort zone, yet they feel they can judge the world. That is judge the world with an all-out deficiency of understanding or will to explore. Or in other words, an absolute narrow mindedness of life and the human race.
I was a student in the early 90’s as well. The difference is the fear. We had the dour feminists activists with their paper petitions you were asked to sign complaining about everything - but you were allowed to ignore or argue with them. I distinctly remember one professor giving an ‘apology’ for using traditional marriage stereotypes to discuss an issue. His apology essentially turned into a lecture that you little activist twits don’t understand ()$(&&) about the real world where these are the scenarios that play out 99% of the time. He was correct of course - but I think the same professor saying the same thing today would be cancelled. What has really happened is that the unhappy weirdos and losers all became university professors and have replicated themselves via expanded university attendance in programs for not very bright students (something something gender something studies). At some point they had the critical mass to take over. The numbers needed are lower than you think - less than 19%. I also think traditional sensible professors got old, stopped caring, and couldn’t be bothered pushing back. The result is they’ve lost their institutions and we may lose our society.
If this keeps going I won’t be able to order a steak because a baby can’t chew it.
I recall the pronoun issue being around in the mid-70s at a seminary I attended in Berkeley. Nutty then, as now.
And to control/outlaw laughter and jokes!
SallyJones
I remember that D'Souza book--he was making interesting, reasonable points then. He remarked on his inability, as a teenager new to an American high school, on his inability to tell white people apart, joked about inviting one girl to the prom and then mistaking another girl for her. But I don't know about revenge of the nerds. I tend to think all this foolishness is a combination of misplaced guilt, mass hysteria and fear.
That's why The Golden Rule is our only hope. Will we ever get back to simply treating others how we wish to be treated?
What a history lesson! The timeline says it all. Thank you for the enlightenment.
Fantastic post exactly from day one till now
And your current company that insists on Latinx.
I own "The Official Politically Correct Handbook!" Though I'd be hard-pressed to track it down on my overflowing bookshelves.
The complete lack of humor is really what distinguishes Woke culture to me.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to many Woke political and cultural stances, just like I'm not entirely unsympathetic to many more—uh? what is anti-Woke? Conservative?—political and cultural stances. I find myself stuck right in the middle, a most unenviable place to be since I can't lay claim to the protective smugness that characterizes either faction.
Back in the 70s, I was a member of something called the Berkeley Women's Feminist Health Collective, and I still remember being widely lambasted at one of the mandatory criticism/self-criticism sessions because I loved wearing makeup.
"Hey, if I were genderless in the primordial ooze, I'd wear makeup," I told them. "I _like_ ornamentation."
None of my castigators so much as cracked a smile.
And that's when I knew that despite my sympathy for many causes on the left, I was in for a rough slog.
'I like ornamentation"...what a perfect view of yourself and such honesty. It's so sad that even back then, your authentic self wasn't ok. That was a telling moment. I hope you are fully adorned with the most beautiful makeup and showing your feminine side. We need more of the feminine who can hold herself in high esteem and be open and caring as well....loved your post!
I love that you call it ornamentation. I think this has been around waaaaay before the 1990s. Aesop wrote about “sour grape-ism” too - if I can’t fit the norms of pretty/cool/athletic, I never wanted it anyway
Thanks for sharing your great line from your Berkeley days: I’m glad it didn’t simply vanish forever as a pearl cast before those commissars. It also reminds me of a line by Eve Babitz in her great, undeservedly obscure and very unWoke book “Slow Days, Fast Company”, commenting on the outcome of a debauched, drug-fueled night in LA: “Passion ornamented by chemistry.”
Patrizia, with all due respect, saying things like "I'm not entirely unsympathetic to many Woke political and cultural stances" is similar to someone saying "maybe Hitler did some things right". There are no genuine "woke" political or cultural stances: it is all using genuine issues for financial or political gain - genocide of the homeless in places like Seattle or LA are good examples.
What we call "woke" is a merger of corporations and faux ideology aimed at preserving corporate power over the society.
"Woke" is at its core anti-human. As such it is anti-culture.
I disagree.
Extremists on both sides of the current political divide are fond of evoking Hitler, of calling the other side fascists. I hear it from my Red Church pals about the Left, and I hear it from my Blue Church pals about the Right.
But fascism has some fairly specific criteria. So I remain unconvinced.
And hopeful that there is a way forward out of the current impasse.
Patrizia, just saying something like "extremists on both sides" would make you an enemy in the "woke" book. Using such phrase at my place of work would cost you your livelihood.
Do you think "woke" are interested in a debate with the almost entire power of global capitalism propping then?
The only way forward is corporations exerting more power over our daily lives, using "woke agenda" as a tool to do so.
And if you think this is just a US issue, ask Sri Lankans or Dutch farmers.
What's going on between you and Patrizia is a discussion or perhaps a debate (between two civilized people). The Woke are not discussing or debating--it's not a national conversation, it's a national negotiation. Negotiations are not about discovering who has the facts or logic on their side, it's about who has the power. And in that sense unfortunately Fielding is correct. We are going to be subjugated to Wokeness, and its very irrationality is what makes it such an efficient loyalty test.
Chris...beautiful...and the "national negotiation" is unlikely to come to an answer, which leads to "Negotiation".
My Mom used to take me to folk concerts when I was pretty small and when she was much more liberal. She always said she was looking forward to them except for the fact she was going to get attitude from all the no-makeup, unwashed hair women in old rumpled clothing who resented her for looking put together! It was true. There were a whole bunch of self-righteous slovenly women giving us the stink-eye.
CD... there in , the direction...is us.
A girl’s gotta have her lipstick 💄 👄 👍🏻
I remember at Berkeley around 1988 somehow being roped into going to an evening for female students "of color" (yes they even said this back then) to share their artistic talents. My friend was involved in putting this on and was worried not enough people would show up. I was much more flexible with my time back then. So I went. There was a really cool performance by this Indian woman doing the "dance of Shiva" and a few other musical numbers. BUT at the end this woman got up and said she was going to read a poem about how she was half-white half-Mexican and how she always hated her white half and hates her white father who left before she was born. It was a straight out racial diatribe generalizing everything bad about the white race and how she wishes he was dead and that all he means to her is "24 million stinking white sperm." I was pretty taken aback by that. I didn't go to any more "evenings" no matter who invited me.
Clemence it really is the overt expression of self-hate and blame. Again, like most woke expressions she focused on the past, uses personal hatred to stereotype millions, lacks creativity and dishes out blame like an endless PEZ dispenser (PEZ is probably racist too).
This is exactly why it is humorless. There is no humor in rage driven hate, Woke is violent, rage driven and absolutely lacking in creativity or solution-based thinking. Thanks to Instagram and Twitter- everyone will know who these people are across the planet... forever. We just need to wait out their time to 'shine'.
Very interesting—thank you for sharing!
Why are these types ALWAYS characterised by humourless, I wonder?
Honestly, I don't know! Humor is such a useful coping mechanism.
Seriously! I’m sure the literature is out there somewhere m, but it’s always the first thing to go.
And probably the antidote to making our way out of this.
When in doubt, accessorize.
I am very low maintenance, chapstick is my main go to! But I love shoes. My husband calls me Imelda and I take that as the highest compliment I can get.
They make some _awesome_ tinted chapsticks these days.
Just sayin'! 😀
Pat... you gave them a flowchart, next step is on them. thanks.
Well, you know, Trump was pretty funny.
I don't _like_ the guy, and I didn't care for most of his policies. (Although I _completely_ agreed with him on China, and he doesn't get credit for some really innovative healthcare-related stuff—like making hospital billing more transparent—which I noticed because by training I'm a healthcare economist.)
But it was always clear to me that many of the statements that the Left jumped on as highly egregious were actually _jokes_, which the Left either willfully or stupidly misinterpreted.
Or maybe humor just doesn't translate in politico-speak. 😥
And the “lies”, all 30,000 or 31,496 of them!!!!!!! were just disagreeing with what he said but in the most fervent and Marxist way ever.
Thank you for your comments, Patrizia! They added great interest to a very enjoyable and thought-provoking exchange! 😊
Awww. What a nice thing to read! Thank you! 😀
Nope, sorry.
Targeting refugees and travelers from majority-Muslim countries; loosening restrictions on lobbyists; dismantling fiduciary protections for retirement funds; trying to end DACA; obstructing unions; the Tax Cut and Jobs Acts (which actually _incentivized_ offshoring of jobs and profits); not to mention his bizarre response to the COVID crisis—these are things I do not like.
However. I could see the _logic_ behind his policy decisions, so I've never frothed at the mouth over them. I simply disapproved of them. 😀
And he _did_ make me laugh! Which is a plus. 😀
North Korea is a majority-Muslim country? The restraints were on countries that send terrorists.
The Tax Cut and Jobs Act actually reduced taxes on lower earners and raised them on upperclass earners (because if you earn $1 million and pay $100,000 in property and state income taxes, now only $10,000 can be deducted; which is why only the wealthy states objected).
Nearly everything President Trump said about COVID has proved correct. He included it in his State of the Union speech on February 4, 2020 (and the Democrats accused him of xenophobia). He set up the high level panel in January and blocked entry to the U.S. from China in the same month. He worked with manufacturers to get the needed PPT and ventilators to states that requested them more quickly than expected. He sent fully staffed naval hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles very quickly. He met with key executives to start Operation Warp Speed, which produced vaccines in record time. He noted the benefits of HCQ from a research journal article, one of the safest pharmaceuticals in the world and it was approved by the FDA. He noted the benefits of UV light, which studies in the Russian Academy of Science confirmed (and a new research paper showed that UV light does cut down infection transmission).
He brought in Stanford's Scott Atlas, the country's leading Public Health Policy specialist. Atlas then brought in 3 other leading specialists, hoping to spend 5 minutes with President Trump. The President started asking questions and discussing key issues, and the meeting lasted 45 minutes.
The one problem was that President Trump couldn't fire Birx and Fauci, who were uninformed and constantly making stupid decisions and then announcing bad and inconsistent policies.
Read Atlas's book, "A Plague Upon our Nation". Even read Birx's book, which shows how uneducated she was.
Thank you for sharing you understanding and recommendations for further investigation, Rfhirsch.
Likewise. I was never hysterical about Trump. I just disagreed with a lot of his policies.
Trump made me laugh too - at him.
He's not "funny". His rally act has been stale and repetitive since about 2017, and his "comedic riffs" are pretty much an untalented attempt at Rodney Dangerfield style humor, but with little of the "self deprecating" part. Most of his "humor" is actually nasty targeting of his opponents, which also manages to use some pretty lame (and also repetitive) inventory of insults.. "crooked", "stupid", "loser", "small", etc. Not exactly the stuff of clever insult comedy.. he can't even crack a good "yo' mama" joke. What makes Trump "funny" is exactly his willingness to crack on his opponents in a direct manner. Otherwise, I guess I just miss what's so entertaining about listening to him free associate for a few hours. Frankly, I think a lot of his fans lose interest after the first hour too, if you watch the way the crowd gets distracted and starts dwindling at about that point in time..
I can see that you & I would have a spirited and (hopefully) pleasant discussion about these matters should we ever find ourselves in the same bar or riding in adjacent seats on a train! 😀
But in the interests of staying on topic, I'm not gonna respond to your points here—except to say that (a) I'm no fan of Unca Joe Biden's, (b) I totally disagreed with mandatory lockdowns and think Sweden had the best approach to COVID, and (c) _, of course,_ corporations should be taxed!
The essay that has prompted our interesting exchange is about the insanity of political incorrectness. And I think we both agree about _that_! 😀
Rules for Radical 101 (Alinsky). "Accuse your opponents of what you are doing."
That seems to fit doesn't it.
It's interesting that those arrested and held in the J/6 travesty were, as in many minor drug case's, overcharged, held without bail, forced into plea deals, painted as demonic terrorist's and, as far as I can tell, even though J/6 committee propagandist lie after lie about them was uncovered, no one in media or involved in social justice took up their cause. As in the case of the Russian gulag, once they were swallowed by the regime, they no longer existed. And, though the reality of the part played by "state actors" in formulation of the event is evident, discussion and evidence about their part remains curtained. The plight of Julian Assange only sporadically comes to our attention and he is the in your face object lesson poster child for totalitarianism's war on free speech and journalism. During the Cheney Presidency how many foreign nationals ended up and are still in Gitmo because a resentful informant neighbor wanted to make some quick American war zone cash. Another obvious horror that we overlook, and across the board driver for the entire boondoggle is that incarceration as a big state bureaucratic industry is profitable. If Mussolini's definition is correct the merger of the "state" with "corporate industry" in building, supplying and staffing the now international prison industrial complex is fascism.
You are correct. But, is the actual reality not that J/6 "..should scare everyone.." but that we're trying to accept the the presence of the totalitarian fear, threat and anger already living inside us that is now damaging and subsuming our lives and our Republic?
Can the Republicans save us? I don't know. We've all been gaslit to the point of madness. Maybe the question is: Can we save ourselves?
(Please excuse the rant. Have a great Labor Day!!)
Mike R.,
Thank you for sharing your comments here. They have sparked my memory on this rarely talked about situation while stirring some deep feelings in me.
Rarely one to follow politics, until my attention was DEMANDED by the appearance of Trump onto our political stage (horrified at his overly competitive, mean-spirited and disrespectful conduct toward ALL involved), I have spent the past 2 years (with the help of BRAVER ANGELS [www.braverangels.org]) re-educating myself on politics and lending my energies to the HARD WORK of helping to DEPOLARIZE our citizenry for the love of my children, grandchildren and our country as a whole.
I have always been more conservative in my worldview and personal perspectives and, although it was a conflicting process of deep prayer and personal reflection, I voted for Trump despite my dislike of his personal style and inability to “stop while he was ahead”.
2020 came, and still conflicted about Trump’s seeming inability to learn from his mistakes, I could NOT bring myself to vote for the Mob’s candidate.
I wanted the personal right to have a place at the table to talk about my views on the leadership of our country. Without casting my vote, I would have no right at that table. So, as conflicted as I was, Trump was the better of the two.
The left’s vitriolic hatred of Trump, and anyone who dared to cast a vote for him, convinced me that those on the left were even more dangerous than Trump. While I saw Trump fall into bully mode at times, I was witnessing a WHOLE Party falling into the bullying role against one man and anyone who dared be associated with him.
How could that ever instill my confidence in the left as the more thoughtful and mature choice? Working as a MOB, not only against Trump, but conservatives as a whole; people just trying to exercise their right to vote their conscience with the only choices available.
When I think of even the little information that I’ve heard about those caught up in the January 6 Riot, seemingly unfairly jailed for even being present, it literally makes my heart hurt. How can human beings be so unfair for the sake of “making an example”? We should ALL be OUTRAGED❗️ “But for the grace of God go I.”
I choose not to watch TV News on a regular basis, so much of my information comes to me through trusted friends and family or personal reading on trusted platforms such as “Substack”.
I am angry (righteously so, in my estimation) at what has been done to our fellow citizens in the name of partisan politics❗️😞 INJUSTICE is WRONG on both sides of the aisle.
I voted for Trump despite my dislike of his personal style and inability to “stop while he was ahead”.
Bingo. You've heard of sore losers? Trump was the worst "winner" in the history of politics.
smits...well pointed "winner"
"..engineered psychosis.." I think so. A manufactured theatre of the macabre masking the crippling ineptitude of second rate politicians and their service to avaricious finance. Take any inch of American problem and they add a yard of hysteria and confusion to it. Always crisis. Never solutions. J/6 is a fire for effect psyop. Their entirety of purpose is the prevention of a healthy American national dialogue and to run cover-up for grift and criminality.
Please God a miracle!
Fight the good fight, Brother!
Pure MADNESS, Barry! 🤯
“To the extent I allow myself hope, this is my path: speaking the truth as I see it as clearly as I can, and hoping that the populace in general starts waking from this horrible, engineered psychosis. It will take a miracle, but miracles do happen.”
Count me in!
BC...you have the molding and the cornerstone in place. thanks...Trumpty saw what was coming and that is now right before our eyes, with the joke (Jan .6th) compound in place.
Very scary stuff!
As a hair-disadvantaged, melanin-deficient person who is struggling to overcome many severe privileges, I can only ask: Can we please have humor back? Please?
Try the Bee:
https://babylonbee.com/
Even the religious stuff is treated with humor.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
You cannot be deferential, polite, or indirect. The only way the Emperor can continue to show his shiny backside is if the Normals are afraid to point it out, and there are far more of us out there than the Lamestream media would have you believe. It is important that everybody - always - in every venue - say to the Cancel Crowd, "You are full of manure, and I Don't Care About Your Feelings."
I wear my "Save America" hat everywhere, every day. People DO notice, and I've kept a tally of comments. So far, two negative, forty-three positive. It's time to stand up and be counted; nothing less than Everything That Matters depends on it.
You’re so right! You might want to consider buying a Gibson’s Bakery hat, too. I did—and apart from helping an unjustly crushed family victimized by malignant Wokeness, for the same purpose: to stand up and be counted.
I'm driving to Columbus in two weeks to get a hopped-up transmission for my diesel truck, thereafter to Cleveland to visit relatives. Oberlin is right on the way. I'll make it a point to visit Gibson's personally and take home as much stuff as we can eat.
Thanks for the tip on the hat. I'm ordering a couple TODAY so's we can have it when we visit.
Good for you Jim--sounds like an awesome, classic, American roadtrip!
Love it!
On the off-chance that a woke nut confronts me, I plan to use the line Jack Nicholson so deftly delivered in “As Good As It Gets”: “Sell crazy somewhere else. We’re all stocked up here”.
Loved as good as it gets especially that line.
Bravo!
I listened to the podcast on Oberlin and Gibson Bakery. Well done. At the end there was a discussion of how current students of Oberlin continue to boycott the bakery. Although all the facts have been established, students still believe the narratives of previous students whose “own truths” are that the owners of Gibson’s must have been racist. And so a four generation family business with 20+ employees is destroyed. Oberlin continues to refuse to pay even the reduced 25 million penalty. Lawlessness all around.
It’s fun to laugh at books. It’s demoralizing to realize our young people have no sense of decency, no sense of right from wrong. They have swallowed the woke Koolaid served to them by the Oberlins of our country.
The Chinese must be laughing and salivating about the absurdity America is becoming.
It is for my children and grandchildren that I work to make my voice of descent heard because of what I see happening.
At 64 years of age, more life behind me than ahead of me, this is a fight worth fighting for those who will be left after I am gone.
There is no perfection on this earth, but we must fight for what is right and excellent to save our Nation. Imperfect as it might be, it has, in it’s finest moments been a light to our world. By HARD WORK and God’s Grace, we WILL weather this historical challenge and be an even brighter light in the end.
The point at the end is critical. Focus your energies on problems and issues that really matter. Stand strong against woke BS, but remember it is a side show
I demur. With Megawoke Biden in charge, it is a side show which is running the show.
A gaggle of UNELECTED communists are steering Sleepy Joe.
Throughout his 50 year career, Joe Biden has blown with the wind - a man who never had an original thought, no vision.
And ran two of the most disgusting witch hunts, namely against a hero Clarence Thomas.
Exactly
The major difference between then and now is that leftists and liberals now have real power to fire, cancel, and destroy people for not toeing the ideological line (and if you’re white, being a foot or more behind the line). In the mid 1990s when I was an undergrad, then spending a few years in the workforce before grad school in the early 2000s, leftists were still blue haired communists who wished the USSR had won the Cold War, but had zero power and certainly didn’t run evil capitalist businesses.
By the end of the decade, they had given up the “communist” title and merged with the Democrat and Labor parties via the “third way” of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, with Hillary the Queen of leftism having taken a back seat after the 1994 trouncing that broke 80 years of near total Democrat control of the US legislature. Instead of sticking to Marxist studies or law (and becoming public defenders or low paid ACLU activists), much to my chagrin, they went to business school, computer science programs and the like, not doing particularly well but good enough to get networked with others of their ilk who are now sketching the death camps and purges and permanent lockdown they have power to implement.
I think your comment illustrates the point that British academic Theodore Dalrymple once made:
"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."
When we consider that Wokeness is political correctness writ large, it all begins to make sense. It's probably why Orwell and Solzhenitsyn and the like sound like such prophets of our moment.
100%. I read through your Substack BTW and it’s very good. I’m mulling over starting my own but need to hone a niche that is related to my specialty (data science and strategic metrics) and that could at least be on par with people like you. Thanks for the inspiration from reading your work.
So nice to hear that, Jeff. Thank YOU for the feedback. And best of luck with the starting a blog!
We all thought the craziness in the universities was confined, maybe even amusing, or it's not in the science departments, so how much harm can it do? But now the miseducated generation is in the boardrooms, the media and the funding or regulating agencies and spreading the poison everywhere.
A lot of them went into the FBI, became Strozk, and work all manner of mischief (see Ray Epps)
Turn off the sound and just observe Strozk when he’s testifying- it’s very revealing and very creepy.
It seems to be based on not calling a thing -- reality-- what it really is. This,
pretty much, used to be called "lying." No one normal, except George Orwell, appears to have foreseen looting as reparations, men as women, or "redefining" raging inflation as no such thing.
The biggest part of this battle is controlling the language. The ‘woke’ claim the moral high ground because they’re ‘not offending anybody’, while systemically offending free thinkers.
While fixated on denigrating, erasing, entire groups.
This is why standpoint theory is so dangerous. If you are white, you cannot make statements about reparations. If you aren’t transgender, you cannot make statements about what is a man or what is a woman. These aren’t lies anymore. They are based on someone’s “lived experience”, which are not lies but rather “their truth”. The entire concept makes me crazy. Whenever I hear “my truth”, I always mentally substitute “my belief”. Whenever someone tells me I am not allowed to discuss something because of my identity group, I know it is because they are either brainwashed or manipulative. What scares me is that there are fewer and fewer places where I feel comfortable expressing my beliefs, and I have no idea what to do about it.
I would continue to discuss whatever you choose. This is bullying, which feeds on intimidation and lots of mean little tricks. The key word in the tactic you identify is "cannot ." Since this entire ideology is an insult to the intelligence, let's also regress to the playground: "Who says? Who says I can't say it? Why are they more important than I am?" Or anyone else?" If they leave, you'll still have had your say. Just don't let them shut you down. When a colleague said something racist, against whites, she assumed I'd agree- --they always assume that. When I disagreed, she immediately shut down, on a dime. Didn't engage, changed the subject. I finished what I was saying, in full, then moved on. The playground had lots of good stuff. "Here goes nothin'" will pretty much get you through anything
My first encounter with this sociopathic behavior was in the late 80s when a friend brought over a woman who happened to be a lesbian to have coffee in my kitchen. She worked at a male gay bar around the corner and I, a well-traveled "fag-hag" dared ask what it was like for a 'girl' to work in a raunchy male bar.
"GIRL????"""" She intoned indignantly.
I was then told that saying "girl" was NOT OK. She was a WOMAN.
Whatever, I said.
The conversation was shut down and so was the prospect of friendship.
In grad school in the early 90s, my roommate constantly one-upped me with this kind of power play. Aware that I hailed from a middling suburb of Chicago, she -- an Amherst grad and -- I now realize -- a card-carrying narcissist -- was determined to put me in my place, not least because I was enrolled in the more prestigious program (somehow transcending my perceived social class.)
And that's what these jerks are. Classists. Elitists. SNOBS.
The big difference between the 90s and now is the ubiquity of tech. Every "transgression" is filmed and preserved. Every post and every tweet. What a 14 year old posts ( and trust me, I coached them for years and they're hilarious) will come back to haunt him or her when they're a 24 year old job seeker. You can't hide from the thought police and their takeover of the Democrat Party has only emboldened them. We only await the formation of Young Pioneers and we already have the makings of rewarding children for ratting out their parents by the pandemic enforcers. Brave young Hungarians in 1956 threw Molotov Cocktails at tanks to rid themselves of this cancer.
Another big difference in the 90s was that we weren't so race-soaked. Will Smith was a superstar and few cared about his skin color. In Living Color was riotously funny and widely appreciated. Michael Jordan was the King of America - loved by all. Race was an afterthought and it wasn't pandering. Have we made progress? Nope. The "progressives" have regressed us to tribalism and the Sovietization of America.
I'm worried that soon, it will be what a 14-year-old did NOT post that will come back to haunt him when he is 24. Failing to spout the Party Line faithfully and regularly got people in trouble in Orwell's 1984, in the Soviet Union, in Mao's (and Xi's) China, and in Castro's Cuba. Now it's come to our shores.
I agree about tech. I think the other contribution tech has made to this mess is allowing the worst aspects of academia to bleed into the real world. I graduated college in 1995 and the 'power and control' elements that characterize wokeness were very much present on my campus. But it was not overly distressing because there was a sense that it need only be temporarily endured. I believe that social media, especially twitter (look at the rampant academic credentialism and the vitriolic debate about even the most picayune matters there) has played a major role in bringing what was once run of the mill campus absurdity to the mainstream. And that very much includes the cultural marxism that was incubated at universities as the heir to traditional marxism, and that powers woke ideology.
P.S. This article treating the early 1990s as ancient history made me feel really old.
The problem with "woke" is that it proponents take themselves way too seriously; the average man or woman is more concerned with providing for their children and navigating the social hellscape these people have created. At the end of the day, no one gives two shits what they think.
James Lindsay has done a deep dive into this topic. He has many lengthy youtube videos tracing its origins. Cultural Marxism was developed to replace Marxism that had relied on conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. When that didn’t work in America, due to upward mobility, new ways to divide people, and set them at each others’ throats, were needed. New Aggrieved groups vs New Agressors were invented. Subgroups were told how they were oppressed, and by whom. Add to this the moral relativism, the loss of belief in God, which meant the loss of any sense of tolerance, forgiveness, charity, and we have the new religion of wokeism. The new virtuous, entitled to punish the new sinners.
Also, a slick way to lay claim to Marxism while actually subverting it. There's an undercurrent in Marcuse of how those idiot plebes don't understand cultural forces so they need elites to guide them. Very nice sleight of hand, that. Fooled a lot of college students in the last decades of the 20th century, I think.
Interesting essay, a great question is when did the aggression become common place. During the 90's there was such a political balance with the GOP dominating Congress and Clinton in the Whitehouse that censorship and shouts down would have likely been met with condemnations by Democrats themselves lest Gingrich and his ilk use it to expand their gains. But I think the big change was the 2000 election. Winning the popular vote but losing by 500 votes in Florida and the in the courts had a lasting impact. 9/11 temporarily covered that up but then as the Iraq war turned into a quagmire the left rose up and the Dem establishment who in many cases supported the war originally simply fed into an increasing aggression w bush. Add the 2004 defeat followed by Katrina and various Bush scandals and you have an increasingly enraged and progressive party. On top of all this the Internet and the blogs were enable progressives and hardcore leftists to expand their reach. After the bailout in 2008 we had Obama who sold him self as unifier, in practice it was his admin who ended up turning title IX into a weapon against due process and redoing what a women could mean. Trump of course sent them all of the rails as a Hands Maid Tale was obviously around the corner unless progressives resisted! There is so much going on, but having Yale law students shout down opposing speakers and demand censorship does not happen over night, something created that and its not just the PC movement.
That seems an unnecessarily partisan reading of that period. There were calls for censorship by each party. And let’s recall that there was a faction of the GOP that was so enraged at President Clinton who had ended a 12 year run of GOP control of the Executive, that it went so far as to accuse President Clinton and his wife guilty of the “murder” of Vincent Forster ... which has its present day incarnation through Jeffrey Epstein. Then, of course, there was Ken Starr’s special counsel investigation of President Clinton that was so open-ended and directionless in search of a crime (including behind the scenes involvement in certain civil actions brought against President Clinton for his behavior as Arkansas Governor) that, were President Trump to face something remotely similar, the caterwauling would be deafening.
Tip O’Neal memorably observed that “politics ain’t beanbag” and a moment’s consideration of our history going back to its founding should convince everyone that today’s nastiness is nothing new but a longstanding tradition, even if it ebbs and flows in intensity. To try to blame one party is to blind oneself to reality, but then it was ever so.
“…IF Trump where to Face some thing remotely similar…”
His entire four years in office was nothing but investigation after investigation and attempts to undermine anything he tried to get done.
'...His entire four years in office was nothing but investigation after investigation and attempts to undermine anything he tried to get done.'
Trump tried to get a state certified vote count changed after the fact. I can still hear his voice recorded telephone call now.. That might be worth undermining.
As for Clinton and the lying over his Presidential blow job - that might be construed as impeachment worthy by overzealous Republicans, but as serious as asking the President of another country to provide dirt on your opponent or risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid?
I'll let history (depending on who writes it..) decide that one.
That’s helpful context and correct as far as it goes, but what you’re missing is that the Democratic Party, the East Coast (and now West Coast as well) Establishment, including importantly the pre-Internet media and the rising domestic interference of the Deep State, were outraged at their loss of power under Reagan and determined to both wrest back the levers of power and silence the populist expression of ordinary people (including “Reagan Democrats”) who yearned to preserve the traditional America now in its death throes.
re: Vince Foster. If Vince Foster had owned a gun, he would probably still be alive today.
I thought he had a gun and shot himself in the back of his head with it, twice.
The heart's a funny thing. It has its own set of spark plug wires and it keeps pumping long after the brain is gone if it's sudden. The lack of blood at the scene of such a head wound has always baffled me. I must have missed that day in med school.
More likely, if he had eyes in the back of his head. Or hadn’t had relations with Her Wickedness.
Your comparison fails. Unlike the completely unjustified Russia-collusion attacks on Trump which came from the entire Democrat and Academic establishments, supported by 90% of the media, the Republican establishment did not accuse slick Willy and Wicked Hillary of anything criminal made up out of whole cloth.
First, even if the “Republican establishment” - however defined - did not accuse President Clinton of “anything criminal” - itself a debatable proposition, it failed to denounce those that did. Whether that was to honor President Reagan’s so called 11th Commandment of not speaking I’ll of a fellow Republican seems quite irrelevant to the current discussion.
Second, name calling (Slick Willy and Wicked Hillary) adds nothing to the merits of your argument, but it does betray either a profound lack of seriousness or maturity.
Charles Knapp
You are not serious, mature or honest. Have you denounced the Democrat Establishment for their Trump-Russia collusion fiction which was created by Wicked Hillary. And Slick Willy had numerous sexual relations with Monica which he not only brazenly denied to the nation but lied about under oath.
If you can take the time and re-read my initial comment, it was to call out a partisan view of a history in which, in fact, both parties are equally guilty. The good-bad binary is nothing novel to today, and it acts as an impediment to understanding things - perhaps by design, but everyone has a choice to fall for it or look beyond it.
I am willing to cut you some slack in your response, because sometimes one gets carried away in the heat of the moment reply. But next time, please consider taking a breath before replying and feel free to edit out the ad hominems, they don’t impress or intimidate, let alone convince.
To answer your specific Russiagate question, I discussed it in comments on other pieces and expressed my views there where it was relevant to the matter under discussion. You might be surprised given the assumptions implicit in your last comment.
The parties are not equally guilty. Republicans have never had a leader as corrupt, demented, dishonest, hateful and anti-American asBiden nor anyone a slick as (oral sex isn’t sex) Willie or as objectively evil as Wicked Hillary, the vile creator of Trump-Russia Collusion.
Your right , the post 9/11 gop was happy to degrade domestic opponents and push for censorship. But it’s not republicans today who are the woke but democrats do my comment is heavy on them .
WTF does "degrade domestic opponent and push for censorship" mean, who did it and most importantly - the Patriot Act was and still is, a bipartisan effort.
So I eagerly await your support for the weak attempt at whataboutism in the face of the damning reality that the left, your left that you reflexively and thoughtlessly defend, is the root of PC tyranny...and it is exactly that, tyranny.
I remember Maher driven off tv for saying the Taliban were brave and the the Dixie chicks nonsense as well. I remember wmd skeptics roundly mocked and ridiculed even though they were right. Was 2002's actions as vast as the current purging and cancel culture , certainly not. But the "your with us or against us" mentality surely was there and if it wasn't for the catastrophic handling of the IRAQ war might have stayed.
Again, the Patriot Act, the Iraq War II, Afghanistan, essentially all the post 9/11 tyranny and the media lap-dogging for it was a bipartisan effort (the swamp's effort).
Remember that the TEA Party was a movement from the right to distance themselves from the swamp's righties. This movement eventually begat Trump (and Bernie on the left).
The conservative right constituency is not a warmongering group - war is wasteful (unless you're a profiteer - the swamp (again, they are bipartisan)). It is the swamp and their cronies that benefit from war, not the conservative right constituency.
Al Qaeda, not the Taliban.
Maher basically said that the men who flew the jets into the towers weren’t cowards. Evil? Sure. But flying an airplane into a skyscraper, which will guarantee your death, in an act of political defiance ? You can call that a lot of things, but it sure ain’t being chickenshit.
I thought his comment was along the lines that we have cruise missiles but the Taliban weren't chickens. But thanks for the correction , heck it was 20 years ago which is crazy in and of itself.
Well said. At the time, I was upset at the persecution of Pres. Clinton, just as I now am about the persecution of Pres. Trump.
Good analysis.
In the last 2 years I’ve been watching a lot of movies that I was too busy to watch when working. I particularly enjoy movies from the 1940s when I believe we reached our cultural apex. I am surprised by how timeless some of these movies are. I believe the Woke have always been with us. The difference is that they are now in charge and they are doing their best to make a mess of everything. The best example of this is of course Joe Biden, who I am told was elected. My what a devastating criticism of the American people. Those who prefer a leader who is demented over one who is justifiably rude are too stupid for words.
In addition to his open southern border policy and his inflationary spending Biden is so mentally and morally defective he believes that 8 is old enough to decide whether one can have an irreversible sex change operation.
And has any American ever given a speech as unhinged and full of hatred as Biden’s imitation of Hitler in front of Independence Hall? Republicans are the new Jews.
America is in for a world of hurt for the next 27 months, but let’s get one thing clear. Almost all of the support for this grossly incompetent and menacing Administration and all of the attacks on freedom of speech are coming from The Left
Biden is trying to provoke a strong reaction, I’m sure they would love to see some people shooting at democrats.
Trudeau did this last year in canada for the same political calculation.
In the summer he said Canada isn’t the kind of place that forces people to get vaccinations.
Then he was told it was the perfect wedge, he instead demonized such people and called an election a few days later.
When the convoy protest began he publicly labeled everyone involved as fascist, misogynist and racist which of course instantly stirred the pot, making it worse.
Which was the whole point.
90% of Canadians now think canada is on the wrong track, hopefully Biden will provoke the same negative reaction.
But I think people are going to be killed.
Because that is what some want
Biden & Co clearly gave that speech to urge people to be violent- there’s also talk that this is the prelude to Biden indicting Trump- Biden is running scared, really scared
They are imploding!
The only decent comment here today! However, what I find with most posts on this site,is that while everybody does not suffer from TDS the ones that do never offer a solution to our current crisis in Government. We are going downhill quickly we need to stop the rot and turn America around. When the midterms come please vote if you think Brandon is right then vote for him if not then vote them out. The rest doesn’t matter we are all Americans we need America to work for us ALL!
It's all fun and games, until malleable young girls are signing up for double mastectomies, boys for castration and mutilation, and both for carcinogenic hormone therapy. Oh, did I mention mandating an unproven and untested vaccine for toddlers and young children against a virus that poses zero risk to that age group, compared to the horrific risks of autoimmunity and cancer in the coming decades posed by the vaccine? And parents defending children against such abominations are now considered to be child abusers.
These great books are the equivalent of Charlie Chaplin's mocking of The Little Dictator, satisfying but it didn't stop the laughable little monster from leaving 45 million dead, and entire people slaughtered on an industrial scale, Europe in ruins, and millions enslaved under communism.
Jordan Peterson was and is 100% correct.
Coerced speech is thought control and this is all about thought control.
My 12 year old daughter is proudly lesbian, announces it from the treetops, has her own specific rainbow flag, (because there isn’t one there are dozens of color patterns one for each specific identity so they can all be part of their own little tribe) and is all about following pronouns.
From my perspective, it’s like OK but can we wait until you are at least thru puberty? Can you just be a child who does child type things regardless of who you think you are attracted to, and just flush all these identity politics for a few years?
Be a kid for god sakes.
The indoctrination on this and of course CLIMATE EMERGENCY!!! is relentless.
I'm sorry you have to watch that.