Tal Bachman: What it Means to be “Woke”

 

For those who seek a good explanation of what it means to be “Woke,” musician Tal Bachman has some good answers (posted at Mark SteynOnline).  Here’s an extract:

. . .Through it all, a counterfeit moral imperative with a deceptively appealing name ("social justice") drives the cult. That counterfeit imperative casts all existence as one great battle between Good (Wokism) and Evil (everything that is not Woke). It denies any constraints on efforts to win that battle. It entails an obsessive totalitarianism. It forbids critical self-examination of itself. Adherents of the cult are Knowers of the One True Truth. They are crusaders in righteous battle. Only victory matters. Anyone so much as questioning the One True Truth, inside or out, must be destroyed.

Although this is often denied to outsiders, Wokist theology requires hatred of America. It teaches that America was conceived in sin and remains insufferably sinful. It therefore decrees that America deserves execution and cremation into nothingness. Into that newly-created void, Wokism itself must move. Only then will righteousness prevail. Making this happen is a sacred obligation for all cult members. Their great success shows their sincerity.

It's worth mentioning that while Wokists want to destroy the United States of America, they don't mind the name. For now anyway, they want to keep it. Retention of the name "The United States of America" works as a kind of soporific: it helps obscure what they're actually doing.

And what they're actually doing is something like an Invasive Parasite Play: While keeping the outer forms (like the country's name, like "elections", etc.) intact, they move in to co-opt and control the structures and institutions which really run the country (which is to say, the structures and institutions which control us). As a result, millions remain oblivious that Wokists are destroying and replacing everything that ever constituted the country—that is, that they are changing what 'The United States of America' actually is.

Among many other things, that means first targeting public order, buildings, cities, fair trials, public trust, careers, police forces, education, laws, educations, freedom of speech and religion and assembly and press, codes of ethics, corporate practices, borders, political boundaries, the military, the economy, demography, religious beliefs, customs, music, books, myths, movies, family dynamics, sexuality, heroes, villains, history, aspirations, everything, and then, wherever possible, either destroying them or replacing them with Wokist substitutes.

I mentioned above the analogy of an invasive parasite, but this play is really something even more ambitious. It's a metamorphosis play, where infiltration, destruction, and replacement is followed by transforming the United States into some completely different entity altogether. That different entity is on track to resemble the former East Germany—a totalitarian puppet-state run by a lawless secret police, subservient to a greater foreign power—far more than any iteration of America throughout its history.

How did we get here? How have so many people—especially Millennials—fallen for a cheap, Marx-inspired, totalitarian deception?

The full column is here.

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VDH: Radical new rules for post-America

 

At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson identifies ten ways in which America is changing, “maybe permanently.” Below are his “rules” summarized as bullet points.  Click on the link to read his full article;  he elaborates on each rule, and it’s not a pretty picture.

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much. 

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore.  

3) Racialism is now acceptable. 

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. 

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. 

6) Hypocrisy is passé. Virtue-signaling is alive. 

7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it.  

8) McCarthyism is good. 

9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. 

10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity itself. 

VDH concludes:

Americans privately fear these rules, while publicly appearing to accept them.

They still could be transitory and invite a reaction. Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized.

The answer determines whether a constitutional republic continues as once envisioned, or warps into something never imagined by those who created it

VDH is an historian and scholar -- hardly a rabble-rouser.  For his full take on these scary rules, click here.

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Mark Steyn on Cancel Culture

 

cartoon credit: michelle-antoinette.com
(click to embiggen or click on the link)

Here’s the conclusion of another excellent column from Mark Steyn:

Going along to get along is killing our society, and the one tiny act that anyone with a modicum of self-respect can perform is refusing to participate. For example, the American Medical Association could try butching up to the standards of nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Heverin of Aberdeen University. Following a campaign led by overseas students to ban the British military from campus, Miss Heverin said:

If the British military makes them feel uncomfortable, why did they come to a British uni?

Then she added, for good measure:

Rule, Britannia!

Young Miss Heverin was promptly banned from all Students Association premises for "discriminatory or racist language", and kicked out of the Politics and International Relations Society for "having a right-wing bias". It's the instant, vicious pettiness of these vile twerps that impresses.

Yet, since the "controversy" broke, a nineteen-year-old student has held firm-ish - or, anyway, more firm than the editor of JAMA or the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens or the chiefs of US Special Operations Command.

And so it spreads . . . from the faculty lounge to the botanical gardens to the general staff to the surgeon in your operating room and the pilot of your plane. Some years ago I wrote:

The dwindling number of sane people in the western world vaguely assume that the politically correct celebrate-diversity nonsense is confined to our increasingly worthless universities or NPR panel discussions. But not so. It's burrowed its way into everything, and is slowly but remorselessly moronizing even vital areas of life.

And some years before that - after a great man, Sir Tim Hunt, had his career vaporized by an utter fraud called Connie St Louis:

So we lose a superb Nobel scientist but keep a third-rate lying mediocrity. My problem with all this is that, increasingly, key levers of society are being ceded to the irredeemably stupid and mendacious, who seem to be the only ones capable of navigating the rocks and rapids of political correctness. One has the uneasy feeling that similar scenarios are playing out every day around the western world. How long before the planes start dropping out of the sky?

Not long now.

Mark Steyn’s full column is here.

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Woke vs. awoken

photo credit: foxnews

From guest blogger Pat:

Leo Terrell was woke but now he has awoken. He's not alone.

People are seeing the destruction wrought on major American cities by looters and rioters, led by Antifa shock troops armed with hammers, bear spray, blinding lasers, commercial fireworks, Molotov cocktails, and more while protected by shields, helmets, industrial quality gas masks and the ability to blend into a larger crowd of BLM protesters for protection. 

The MSM [mainstream media] support Antifa and BLM and hide from public view the violence committed by those radical groups. When Rep. Jim Jordan showed a video of the violence at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in Congress, the MSM cut away. The head of the Committee, one Jerrold Nadler, flat out denied that the protests were anything but peaceful.

But, the MSM no longer has a monopoly on the news. Citizen journalists, bloggers, talk radio and even local TV channels are reporting on the destruction, which largely impacts poorer neighborhoods. The locals are figuring out that the white Antifa radicals that attacked their local supermarket, drugstore and police precinct are not fighting to improve their lives. Nor are the mobs that follow, under the umbrella of BLM, that loot and destroy these neighborhood foundations. 

BLM, Antifa and the MSM may be the woke darlings of today's Democrat party but they have awoken a silent coalition of all races and creeds that rejects divisive rhetoric and violence and wants a civil society restored. Despite the best efforts of the woke tech giants, it will be restored on November 4th, 2020.

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Every Sports Team Must Change Its Name

Daniel Greenfield’s article “Every Sports Team Must Change Its Name” highlights the insanity of this craze to re-name sports teams.  And of course it won’t stop with sports teams.  Mr. Greenfield begins:

Every name is racist. Every name must change.

The Washington Redskins agreed to change a name that offended no one except white leftists, but the media, which always speaks with forked tongue, is demanding more sports scalps.

The Cleveland Indians have issued a statement whining that "the recent social unrest... has only underscored the need for us to keep improving as an organization on issues of social justice."

Remember when the Indians were just known for being cursed with the second-longest championship drought in sports, now they can be cursed for their commitment to social justice.

The curse used to be known as the Curse of Chief Wahoo, but he's already been purged for political incorrectness. And now the Indians announced that they're "committed to engaging our community and appropriate stakeholders to determine the best path forward with regard to our team name.” Those stakeholders won't be their fans or anyone who knows what baseball is.

. . .

Some media editorialist will, eventually, link the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Southern cavalier mythos and accuse them of white supremacy. The English Civil War would seem to have little to do with a Cleveland team, but King Charles I was involved in the African slave trade.

“The name Cleveland Cavaliers represents a group of daring fearless men, whose life's pact was never surrender, no matter what the odds,” the fan who won a contest to name the team wrote.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

. . .

The simplest solution might be for every team to change its name to Black Lives Matter.

And when the Pittsburgh Heinz Black Lives Matters play the New York MetLife Black Lives Matters, it’ll be a little bit confusing, but that’s okay because no one will be watching.

Read the full article here.

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Schlichter: Stop Making Sense

It does seem almost impossible to make sense out of the chaos we are seeing everywhere.  Kurt Schlichter is always funny, and he always makes sense.  Here’s are some snippets from “Stop Making Sense” at Townhall:

You cannot reason with these people. Forget trying to convince them. You are not going to talk them out of their quest for power over you by deploying bourgeois conceits like "facts" and "evidence." Yet so many of us see what's happening and still take to Twitter or (increasingly) Parler to point out the sheer ridiculousness of the enemy's latest antics. But these actions are not ridiculous. They are tactically genius. Instead of confronting an impenetrable defense, they just scuttle around it and attack into our rear.

. . .

It's time for us to riot, not in the streets, because we have jobs and we're not going to destroy our own stuff, but at the ballot box. That's where we lay waste to their Venezuelan dreams. In the primaries, vote for woke conservatives, not establishment saps. And then in November, vote straight Republican down the ballot.

. . .

Finally, step four: Stop making sense. Unless it's directed at the unwoke, making sense is a waste of your time. This is about power. Time to use yours.

Mr. Schlichter’s article is here.  And it’s a bit of a wild ride.

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