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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.