Woke and Cancel Culture Gone Wild, Chapter III

    “In much of the Western world, the liberal takeover of institutions is nearly complete. But the revolution isn’t coming.” — @verdur_in observes a reactionary backlash emerging instead https://t.co/7dw6VFWMqz

    — The Critic (@TheCriticMag) March 8, 2023

    (Continued. Chapter II is HERE (locked to new comments)

    Comments


    While contemplating white male privilege... (Murdaugh et al)

    Then again what's happened to the head of BLM with her new houses And such?








    Carl's a normie Dem with 10K followers - not even centrist, he's pretty FDR liberal - following people like him is how I know that Woke lefty cancel culture is still very much operative:


    here we go again:

    that the NYPost is making a big deal about this story is part of the whole shtick


    here we go again, II:



    he got several good replies, but this is the best one wink


    Joker and Taxi Driver? Are you saying PoC's are laughable and mentally unbalanced? White privilege again...


    Paging Doc Cleveland, bet he's having some fun now, yep, oh boy

    the quips continue...

    and then there's retweets like this

    publish or perish, madam, and bullshit or not that's the narrartive that the powers-that-be are publishing these days in the humanities


    Stanford Law School is far from immune, here's proof at the end of his thread:

    Really disgusting behavior! Just wait til this crew starts showing up in the courts.

     


    More -




    How'd she get to be Dean?  She's a 12-year-old.


    Ted Cruz sees red meat here, just pointing it out:


    the drama at Stanford Law continues (thread)


    good question:

    This Stanford brouhaha just makes me want to grind this axe again — why would Stanford Law School, an institution whose only purpose in life is to be exclusive and hierarchical, have a dean whose job is to pretend to be trying to make it equitable and inclusive?

    — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 17, 2023

    And it’s not like this is unique to Stanford. The core function of every high ranked American college and university is hierarchy and exclusion.

    Maybe they want to also be diverse, but that’s different from being equitable and inclusive.

    — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 17, 2023

    & there's a long thread of replies

    but let me just point out the thing of elites thinking they represent what 'the underclass' wants again


    and not enough Dems are willing to 'Sister Souljah' them


    1978, what's old is new again.Inflation soaring,underclass being a big problem with babies having babies, Carter's version of the 'new south' all the rage, so "Hollywood" was doing the 'woke' thing hot and heavy, Dems still all for tax-and-spend" LBG era, and so a whole bunch of Dems became "Reagan Democrats" -


    res ipsa loquitor -





    "tenets", dammit.


    very sad -


    A bit dumb. Blacks made up 1/4 the vote in 2016 primaries. Even tho Biden's black support fell, he won 90% of the black vote (and 39% of his vote was PoC). Unsurprising that a devoted block of voters gets a shout-out. Here maybe 50% black, not sure where or for what the photo is. And w/o Clyburne's deal, he was running i to trouble in the primary vote that would've hurt him.

    Maybe I was youthfully naive, but i thought Jackson's "Rainbow Coalition" was kind of cool (but it wasn't built on white shaming, justifying destructive riots and spikes in gun deaths - somehow felt more like kitchen table issues).

    Interesting 538 exercise showing black peer pressure gets black conservatives supporting a black liberal (Obama).

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-so-many-black-voters-are-democr...

    Meanwhile, here's how Joe's 2020 figures panned out - not losing non-college whites while padding college whites a bit made for the success - yes, Cubans and Texas Mexicans abandoned but also Wisconsin Hispanics. Part we can guess is Hispanics aren't so down with BLM and George Floyd junkie messaging, while Hispanics are building on the American dream, not so much Latinx woke victimhood.

    https://www.vox.com/2021/5/10/22425178/catalist-report-2020-election-bid...

     

     


    Sorry it's your opinion that strikes me as clueless. Reasons off the top of my head:

    1) The vote for Biden has something to do with who gets to be congressional interns?

    2) Black voters care who gets to be congressional interns? If so, won't the Dem picture make Black male voters angry?

    I find their photo nearly as insulting to the intelligence as this:

    Fact check: Kente cloths have ties to West African slave trade


    Well you did catch me before coffee, so i didn't register it was congressional interns.

    25% of Congress folk are PoC, so interns that are closer to 50% PoC would st Ike me as discriminating against whites pretty hard, and it can be a pretty important credential for budding politicians or bureaucrats/civil servants.

    Actually if 90% of PoC in Congress are Democrats, then roughly 40% of Dem congresspeople would be PoC? so an ethnic makeup in that ballpark is near normal, no?

    (this photo was taken in 2016, numbers have shifted a bit since - quite a few more females were elected in 2018, 2020 & 2022, tho i can't say female PoC or especially black female).

    (and to be sexist, i imagine often females will do a better job in the kind of work interns do than frequently testosterone full-of-themselves males who may expect more to start towards the top, but then again, female law students prolly aren't gunning for coffee/Xerox duty either - not sure what the background is for these interns - all high school, or some college?)





    This video is not "woke". But I think it's wonderful!





    oh boy frown


    Well, to detox a colon sounds like i gotta go pollute it first,
    wish I could drink like in the old days... would help me ignore this rubbish.


    Martha Stewart: she's coming after your shtick (and your friendship with Snoop won't help you as he's complicit)


    Good to know my pickle containers are tabooi remember coming to India how even disheveled shanties on the inside could look immaculate with super clean sheets, etc 

    But that's just me appropriating.



    what's new is old:


    Norway's healthcare watchdog not woke:


    Anti-woke in the Bronx:


    'The free speech skeptics abandon Salman Rushdie'

    #savethewriter https://t.co/mMTu9iEp81

    — Michael Maiello (@MichaelMaiello) March 17, 2023

    https://t.co/gM9f6dyRpf via @Harpers

    — Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) March 17, 2023

    I'm gonna paste the whole article, fair use basis, because it's important, not the least of which because Oates is mentioned in it (as signing a letter against an award to Charlie Hebdo) and one wonders whether she has changed her mind. My underlining:

    A Climate of Fear Harper's March 2023 issue

    The free speech skeptics abandon Salman Rushdie
     

    Salman Rushdie’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, closes as its author emerges in 2002 from years in hiding; he bids goodbye to members of the security detail that has guarded him since Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa called for his death. “That was it,” Rushdie writes. “More than thirteen years after the police walked into his life, they spun on their heels and walked out of it.” Still, he wonders whether “the battle over The Satanic Verses” has ended in “victory or defeat.”

    This may seem a strange question. Rushdie’s novel had not been suppressed; in fact, its literary and political significance was widely recognized, and its author was alive and well. Both Rushdie and those charged with his protection believed that the threat against him had abated enough for him to return to public life. Yet Rushdie ends his memoir on a note of concern: he writes that the “climate of fear” had intensified since the fatwa was issued, making it “harder for books like his to be published, or even, perhaps, to be written.”

    As it happens, he had cause to worry. In the intervening years, support for Rushdie and for free expression has narrowed—a fact made particularly clear since his August 2022 stabbing by an American of Lebanese descent who expressed admiration for Khomeini and condemned Rushdie after reading “a couple pages” of The Satanic Verses. The assault, which put Rushdie in intensive care and left him blind in one eye, would have been unimaginable without the fatwa, yet many have been content to treat it as a random act of violence by a lone madman.

    An August 19 New York City rally of writers gathered in support of Rushdie reprised a 1989 demonstration against the fatwa in which Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens, and others participated, but the later iteration “paled in comparison,” a Le Monde editorial remarked. Across social media, writers expressed concern for Rushdie’s health, but an instinctual solidarity with him and the sense—so strong at the time of the fatwa—that his fate spoke to all of us as members of a liberal society did not materialize. Even among his defenders, free speech took a back seat.

    Why? One reason is fear. In 2009, the British writer Hanif Kureishi told Prospect Magazine that “nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses.” He might have added that no one would have the balls to defend it. Most writers, Kureishi continued, live quietly, and “they don’t want a bomb in the letterbox.”

    The effectiveness of threatened violence was proven by an event that came to be known as “the Danish cartoon crisis.” In 2005—the same year that Ayatollah Khamenei reaffirmed Rushdie’s death sentence—the left-wing Danish author Kåre Bluitgen sought an illustrator for a children’s book about Mohammed but was reportedly unable to find one due to artists’ fears of retaliation. The story caught the attention of editors at Jyllands-Posten, one of Denmark’s leading newspapers, who solicited members of the forty-two-person newspaper illustrators’ union to draw the prophet in a test of self-censorship. They received twelve submissions. Their publication, alongside an essay on the experiment by culture editor Flemming Rose, led to a series of violent protests over several months in which hundreds of people died. The controversy became international news, but the vast majority of U.S. outlets that covered it did not reprint the cartoons, so as to avoid instigating more violence.1 When Yale University Press published the definitive scholarly work on the subject, Jytte Klausen’s The Cartoons that Shook the World, the publishers also declined to reprint the cartoons, against the author’s wishes. The press’s director, John Donatich, explained that he did not shy away from controversy, as shown by the fact that he had published an “unauthorized” biography of the Thai monarch: “I’ve never blinked.” But despite this record of untold bravery, he did not want “blood on [his] hands” by reprinting the cartoons.

    That offense to fundamentalist Muslims will result in bloodshed—and that any spilled blood would be “on the hands” of those whose free expression caused the offense—remains a bedrock assumption for editors and publishers, as recent examples demonstrate. In 2008, Random House—Rushdie’s own publisher in the United States—sent around advance copies of The Jewel of Medina, a novel about Mohammed and his child bride, for promotional blurbs. When some of those solicited declined on the grounds that the book might provoke violence, Random House simply pulled the plug, claiming that it wanted to protect “the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel.” Rushdie was vocal about his disappointment: “This is censorship by fear,” he said, “and it sets a very bad precedent indeed.”

    Censorship by fear can take two forms: top-down or bottom-up. From the top, a publisher or editor can stop publication over concern about a potential reaction. If the right to free expression is qualified by the condition that you not “upset someone, especially someone who is willing to resort to violence,” Rushdie noted in Joseph Anton, it is no longer a right. However, the text or cartoon still exists, and might appear elsewhere (a small publisher picked up The Jewel of Medina after Random House scrapped it). But bottom-up censorship—self-censorship—is more nefarious, more widespread, and more difficult to track. Writers shelve projects before they see the light of day. The cartoon is undrawn, the novel or the scene unwritten. “The fight against censorship is open and dangerous and thus heroic,” the Yugoslavian novelist Danilo Kiš observed in 1985, “while the battle against self-censorship is anonymous, lonely and unwitnessed.”

    Despite the heroism of so many writers behind the Iron Curtain, some Western commentators throughout the Cold War claimed that citizens of the Soviet bloc valued the right to work, housing, free medical care, and education, but didn’t desire the imposition of Western liberal principles. Demands that those living under communist regimes be guaranteed freedom of expression were thus considered a form of imperialism. Many progressives offer the same interpretation when discussing the Muslim world today.

    There is another reason support for Rushdie is not as strong as it should be: the increasingly widespread belief that free speech operates as a tool of the elite, that it ought not to be applied to speech that risks harm to marginalized groups. In a 2015 interview, Rushdie suggested that if the fatwa had come down then, commentators would be more upset that he’d insulted a minority group than that his life was endangered.

    At the time, Rushdie was responding to fresh controversy: PEN America—the writers’ organization for which Rushdie had previously served as president—had given the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo an award after Islamic terrorists raided an editorial meeting and slaughtered twelve people over the magazine’s history of mocking Mohammed.2 To Rushdie’s amazement, over two hundred great and not-so-great writers—including Francine Prose, Geoff Dyer, Michael Ondaatje, Joyce Carol Oates, and Teju Cole—protested the award. If a writers’ group cannot defend free expression, Rushdie wondered, what can it do? To the righteous protesters, the cartoonists had intended to cause “humiliation and suffering” by attacking devout French Muslims who were “already marginalized, embattled and victimized.” Moreover, the cartoonists ignored the power dynamic at play—the fact that, supposedly, the illustrators with their pens held all the power, while the terrorists with their guns held none. (Convey that news to the families of the dead.)

    This protest demonstrated the left’s retreat from free speech. For the American essayist Eliot Weinberger, the award was “merely the latest instance in the now-rampant free expression of gentlemanly Islamophobia.” Weinberger was probably pleased that the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a British outfit which claims to defend “the oppressed,” bestowed its “Islamophobe of the Year” award on Charlie Hebdo just two months after the massacre. First you get murdered in your office, then a human rights group posthumously condemns you for offending your killers.

    The PEN protest popularized the idea that free speech should face limits when it comes to marginalized groups. The free speech movement of the old campus left apparently had the story upside-down: the new progressive credo posits that free speech sustains racism. In a recent article with the lovely title the settler coloniality of free speech, the scholar Darcy Leigh argues that free speech props up “white supremacist colonial power.” Rather than serving as a public good, Leigh explains in a model of academic prose, the “liberal politics around the freedom of free speech have functioned to control or silence Indigenous, Black, and/or otherwise racially othered speech.”

    What this view means in practice was recently demonstrated at Minnesota’s Hamline University, when the adjunct professor Erika López Prater showed a fourteenth-century painting of Mohammed to a global art history class. The image was not a satirical drawing but an illustration from medieval Persia, and López Prater gave advance warning, allowing any student who might take offense to leave. Nonetheless, the university fired López Prater following complaints from Muslim students, and the university’s president co-signed a letter stating that the feelings of the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.”

    The free speech skeptics might want to read up on the history of abolitionism. In 1860, Frederick Douglass participated in a meeting of abolitionists in Boston. A mob of anti-abolitionists stormed the hall and silenced the gathering. When Douglass finally gave his prepared remarks, he included some thoughts on free speech. He found the excuse that the meeting in crisis-ridden Boston was “ill-timed” unconvincing: “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.” The right to free speech, he stated, strikes fear in the heart of tyrants. “It is the right which they first of all strike down. . . . Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble. . . . Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.”

    One wonders what the bien pensants who prefer inoffensive expression would do with Voltaire, who regularly signed his letters “Écrasez l’infâme!” This translates to “crush the abomination,” by which he meant the Catholic Church. Today’s progressives would probably charge him with humiliating the faithful. Voltaire failed to understand the plight of provincial Catholics; Weinberger would doubtless take him to task for a gentlemanly anti-clericalism.

    The point is, the liberal literati are backing away from freedom of expression. As one British free speech advocate recently asked, “Where is the ‘Je suis Salman Rushdie’ movement? Answer: nowhere.

     is the author, most recently, of On Diversity.

    also note the reference in the article to leftists during the Cold War who excused lack of freedom of speech in the Soviet Union, and think about how that relates to Putinist Russia 


    The Samizdat literary warriors under Communism relied on a brother/sisterhood of patriots to free speech to keep forbidden material in circulation. The signatories if the Czech dissident Charter77 were known as much for their resultant suffering - Havel's incarceration the best known, but far from the only - while government reprisals against any signs of non-allegiance were quick, even tho often mundane - loss of job, exile from Prague to a village, reprisals against one's parents, and other assorted deaths by a thousand cuts. Voting was expected to be 100%, so anyone not participating was chased through the streets lest the village suffer reprisals as a hotbed of non-conformity. Waving the appropriate flag on whatever Communist commemoration was of course de rigeur, and non-participants even through foolish neglect would see "privileges" rescinded. Children were expected to be good "pioneers" (Communist version of scouts), training ground for next-gen fellow travellers. This is covered by the the movie "years under the dog", where a Prague café socialite/actress and her foolish but tnthusiastic business husband are exiled to the non-cafe'd well socially monitored boonies a few miles out of Prague.

    "




    whatever continues 'the narrative'


    three of those evil white hetero guys plotting white supremacy or some such 

    (just because I felt like sharing the picture; I was never a big fan of any of the 3 but now they look comparatively charming to pop culture these days)



    This really should be every bit as disturbing as what Scott Adams said, if even more patronizing.

    — Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) March 20, 2023

    The reality is, we do end up with our racially limited cliques whether we say it overtly or not.
    It's the irony of academia and such where we're supposed to be so level and equal,
    and then people want their celebrations. I still remember college with the "black table"
    in the cafeteria - yet I joined them a few times, all was cool (maybe not if they were more radical).


    He's correct:



    Nate Cohn  What’s ‘Woke’ and Why It Matters

    A marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years

    at NYTimes.com 'Tilt' subscriber-only newsletter, March 24, WITH MY UNDERLINING. (fair use full copy)

    Believe it or not, the term woke wasn’t uttered even once in the Republican debates back in 2015 and 2016.

    Now, I’d be surprised if we make it out of the opening statements of the first primary debate without hearing the term.

    Whatever you think of the phrase, the rise of “woke” to ubiquity is a helpful marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years.

    There’s a new set of issues poised to loom over the coming campaign, from critical race theory and nonbinary pronouns to “cancel culture” and the fate of university courses. Fifteen years ago, I would have said these topics could divide a small liberal arts campus, not American politics. I would have been wrong.

    This change in American politics is hard to analyze. It is hard to craft clear and incisive questions on these complex and emerging topics, especially since the phrase “woke” is notoriously ill-defined. Last week, the conservative writer Bethany Mandel became the subject of considerable ridicule on social media after she was unable to concisely define the term in an interview. She’s not the only one. Apparently, there’s a “woke” part of the federal budget. “Wokeness” was even faulted for Silicon Valley Bank collapse.

    But while the definition of “woke” may be up for debate, there’s no doubt that the term is trying to describe something about the politics of today’s highly educated, young “new” left, especially on cultural and social issues like race, sex and gender.

    As with the original New Left in the 1960s, the emergence of this new left has helped spark a reactionary moment on the right. It has split many liberals from their usual progressive allies. And it has helped power the rise of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has done more to associate himself with fighting “woke” than any other politician. Like it or not, “woke” will shape this year’s Republican primary.

    What’s woke?

    The new left emerged in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012. At the time, liberalism seemed utterly triumphant. Yet for young progressives, “hope” and “change” had given way to the realization that Mr. Obama’s presidency hadn’t cured income inequality, racial inequality or climate change. These dynamics opened a space for a new left, as young progressives started to reach for more ambitious politics, just as the triumph of the Obama coalition gave progressives the confidence to embrace ideas that would have been unimaginable in the Bush era.

    A decade later, this new left is everywhere. On economic issues, there has been the Bernie Sanders campaign and calls for Medicare for all; democratic socialism; and the Green New Deal. On race, there has been the Black Lives Matter movement; kneeling in protest during the national anthem; and defund the police. On gender and sex, there has been the Me Too movement and the sharing of preferred pronouns and more.

    On class and economics, it’s easy to delineate the new left. Mr. Sanders helpfully embraced the democratic socialism label to distinguish himself from those who would incrementally smooth out the rough edges of capitalism. It’s harder to distinguish the new left from Obama-era liberals on race, gender and sexuality. There is no widely shared ideological term like democratic socialism to make it easy.

    And yet the differences between Obama-era liberals and the new left on race, sexuality and gender are extremely significant, with big consequences for American politics.

    Here are just a few of those differences:

    • The new left speaks with righteousness, urgency and moral clarity. While liberals always held strong beliefs, their righteousness was tempered by the need to accommodate a more conservative electorate. Mr. Obama generally emphasized compromise, commonality and respect for conservatives, “even when he disagreed.”

      As Obama-era liberalism became dominant, a more righteous progressive discourse emerged — one that didn’t accommodate and even “called out” its opposition. This was partly a reflection of what played well on social media, but it also reflected that progressive values had become uncontested in many highly educated communities.

    • The new left is very conscious of identity. Obama-era liberals tended to emphasize the commonalities between groups and downplayed longstanding racial, religious and partisan divisions. Mr. Obama was even characterized as “post-racial.”

      Today’s new left consciously strives to include, protect and promote marginalized groups. In everyday life, this means prioritizing, trusting and affirming the voices and experiences of marginalized groups, encouraging people to share their pronouns, listing identities on social media profiles, and more. This extension of politics to everyday life is a difference from Obama-era liberalism in its own right. While the Obama-era liberals mostly focused on policy, the new left emphasizes the personal as political.

      Today’s new left is conscious of identity in policymaking as well, whether it’s arguing against race-neutral policies that entrench racial disparities or advocating race-conscious remedies. Obama-era liberals rarely implemented race-conscious policies or mentioned the racial consequences of racially neutral policies.

    • The new left sees society as a web of overlapping power structures or systems of oppression, constituted by language and norms as much as law and policy. This view is substantially informed by modern academic scholarship that explains how power, domination and oppression persist in liberal societies.

      Indeed, almost everything debated recently — critical race theory, the distinction between sex and gender, we can go on — originated in academia over the last half-century. Academic jargon like “intersectional” has become commonplace. It can be hard to understand what’s going on if you didn’t read Judith Butler, Paulo Freire or Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in college.

      Academic scholarship is also the source of the expanded, academic meanings of “trauma,” “violence,” “safety” and “erasure,” which implicitly equate the psychological harm experienced by marginalized groups with the physical harms of traditional illiberal oppression.

      This does not readily lend itself to a “politics of hope,” as virtually everything about America might have to change to end systemic racism. No law will do it. No candidate can promise it. But it does imbue individual actions that subvert oppressive hierarchies with liberatory and emancipatory implications, helping explain the urgency of activists to critique language and challenge norms in everyday life.

    • The new left view that racism, sexism and other oppressive hierarchies are deeply embedded in American society all but ensures a pessimistic view of America. This is quite different from Obama-era liberalism. Indeed, Mr. Obama himself was cast as a redeeming figure whose ascent proved American greatness.

    • When in conflict, the new left prioritizes the pursuit of a more equitable society over enlightenment-era liberal values. Many of the academic theories, including critical race theory, critique liberalism as an obstacle to progressive change.

      In this view, equal rights are a veneer that conceal and justify structural inequality, while some liberal beliefs impede efforts to challenge oppression. The liberal value of equal treatment prevents identity-conscious remedies to injustice; the liberal goal of equal opportunity accepts unequal outcomes; even freedom of speech allows voices that would offend and thus could exclude marginalized communities.

    Is this a definition of woke? No. But it covers much of what woke is grasping toward: a word to describe a new brand of righteous, identity-conscious, new left activists eager to tackle oppression, including in everyday life and even at the expense of some liberal values.

    Why woke matters for Republicans 

    The rise of the new left on race and gender is already reshuffling conservative politics.

    For this year’s Republican primary, one of the most important things about this rise is that it has helped bridge the usual divide between the conservative base and the establishment.

    At least for now, the establishment and the base share the fight against “woke,” for two reasons:

    • The new left is far enough left that there’s room to side with the right while keeping one or both feet in the center. Whether it’s a MAGA fan or a Reaganite, there’s a path for an enterprising politician to bash “woke” and get on Fox News without alienating donors. Anyone can be a conservative hero, even a private equity magnate who would have been seen as an establishment squish in 2015, like Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

      Anti-woke politics seems to animate elite conservatives as much as the activist, populist base. After all, the new left is most prevalent in highly educated liberal bastions like New York or Washington, and among the young in highly educated industries like the news media and higher education. Its rise has probably been felt most acutely by highly educated conservatives as well.

    Whether this dynamic changes is an important question as the primary heats up.

    Over the last few months, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have staked out farther-right positions that might put this question to the test. Mr. Trump, for instance, said he would pass a federal law recognizing only two genders and would punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care for minors. Mr. DeSantis, for example, would ban gender studies. As the campaign gets underway, they may go further. We will learn whether other candidates match their positions, and whether there’s a cost if they do not. There is even a chance conservatives go too far.

    Another big question is whether anti-woke politics can supplant older culture war fights, like abortion or immigration. Most anti-new-left conservatives still vigorously oppose the old liberals on immigration, secularism, feminism and more. It remains to be seen whether attacking D.E.I., Disney and university professors, as Mr. DeSantis did in a recent trip to Iowa, is the red meat for rank-and-file conservatives that it is for conservatives in urban centers like Manhattan who feel under siege by an increasingly assertive left.

    Unfortunately, there is almost no survey data that helps answer these questions at this stage. The behavior of Fox News producers and the rise of DeSantis suggest that there’s some kind of mass constituency for this politics, but whether it amounts to 30 percent or 60 percent of the Republican base and whether it’s compelling enough to carry a primary bid is entirely unclear.

    In the most extreme case for Democrats, the backlash against the new left could end in a repeat of how New Left politics in the 1960s facilitated the marriage of neoconservatives and the religious right in the 1970s. Back then, opposition to the counterculture helped unify Republicans against a new class of highly educated liberals, allowing Southern opponents of civil rights to join old-school liberal intellectuals who opposed Communism and grew skeptical of the Great Society. The parallels are imperfect, but striking.

    On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the possibility that a populist, working-class conservative base perceives little distinction between “woke” and “liberal,” and would rather hear the old classics on illegal immigration, crime and coarse language about women and Mexicans than fight new battles against “woke capital,” critical race theorists and transgender teenagers.

    The range of possibilities for the general election are similarly wide. We’ll save the general election for another time.



    Well, Bernie a non-Democrat running against Hillary, running on mostly unachievable or unrealistic policies for the petulant crowd, and then pouting his way through the convention and half his followers left certainly helped the party, even as she was bailing out Obama's mis-managed DNC yet getting blamed for it (Tulsi's early role in pumping up the # of debates flap was grand; Bernie's campaign role in jíst happening to find Hillary's donation target database open and downloading copies - again Hillary getting blamed for it...

    I'm still trying to figure out if ActBlue's $27 donation miracle/madness could be gamed by an outsider - say Russians with PayPal accounts - but the initial websites i found say it's actually reported VA anonymous donations direct to a candidate (some overall iverco tributiins, but I'm more talking about massive $15mil in individual donations when Bernie announced before was even well-known)

    How much of what's happening now is surreptitious funding & incitement of both left & right, whether Roger Stone-like or foreign gov like would be useful to know. The patterns are being outlined in Proud Boys - enlist the "normies" to augment the limited hardcore insurrectionists. Except it works for both sides - so even George Floyd protests.

    Alright, my token conspiracy post.

    ETA - the 3rd wave feminism that condemned Hillary's expecting any female support as white privilege certainly helped launch the latest round of wokedom, including horrifically misogynistic rants about "i don't vote my vagina", meaning "fuck that Clinton cunt", frequently in that harsh terminology. Black rapper Killer Mike repeating the uterus slur & being excused by the Sanders campaign as basically Hillary trying "gotcha politics" vs getting edyikated by Jane Elliott, ur-woke diversity author (and ignoring the traditional role of black rapper misgyny as well) and immediately plumping for Nina Turner - black state senator. Message: female PoC, cool! White female? Take 2 or 3 steps back. And thus over sexism against whites became a commonstaple of our modern leftist contingent, often by white women like Elliott as much as black females or "Latinxes".  Killer Mike mansplainin' Hillary's uterus and getting away with it - quite the day.
    Here's how they justified Killer Mike using another woman to set up the equity cue balls:


    I'm trying to remember how Elizabeth Warren survived as well as she did.
    Curious if health care is still remembered as a goal 7 years later, universal unlikely,
    if a "bullshit drug war" back then is tied to black-and-black mass shootings now,
    if kids getting shot might prevent them from going to college,
    if "super-predator" would be ok to use for shooters who ravage an elementary school.
    But crime & violence takes a backseat to the need to comb through history & fix it all - 
    statues, commentaries, official pronouncements, whatever - learning to read can't compete
    with equity-splainin' all of history.

     


    Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop contributions to woke shouldn't be forgotten, even if not very political.

    Here she is in a trial for leaving a ski accident with a guy having skull injury and broken bones, but still manages to find the worst lawyer in the world to cringingly fluff up her fashion ego during testimony, seemingly while she again underestimates the seriousness of the event, and has weirdly said her brain thought there was some sexual assault going on because her legs were spread apart and she heard a guy grunting with his body pressed against her. "left him with “a brain injury, four broken ribs and other injuries” TFW.

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gwyneth-paltrow-testifies-initially-think...


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