“I needed to know what was going on”

This morning I attended an excellent, informative business breakfast in Auckland where the guest speaker was former Commissioner of Police, Mike Bush. He gave an erudite account of how management of a police force, and particularly being in charge of major disasters, bears a lot of similarity with business planning.

One of his examples of planning and control was the Christchurch mosque attack in March 2019. He described how at Police National HQ there was a planning room of a very decent size, where they would head to in the event of a major operation. As news broke of Tarrant’s mayhem, off they went to plan the response.

One of the first things he asked for was for the live Facebook coverage of the carnage to be displayed on the big screen. He simply explained that he had to know what was going on, in order for him, and the police in general, to be able to respond, and what better way to know what was happening than to watch it live, despite how distressing it was to everyone watching. But he reiterated, as distressing as it was, he explained again, “I needed to know what was going on”. The correct response was only possible if he knew what was being said and done.

Of course, when the madness ended, and the shock and sadness was setting in, we all still needed to know what went on so that, as a country, we could plan, respond and educate ourselves to ensure it never happened again. Yet, Tarrant’s manifesto was banned and de-platformed.

I have a book on my bookshelf simple called “Hitler”. It is a biography of the murderous tyrant written by English author, Ian Kershaw. I am creeping my way through it, mostly due to lack of time rather than lack of enthusiasm. There are some graphic accounts of the man’s evil thinking – it is, so far, exceptionally informative.

Last night on the news was a story about how some so-called “extremists” are attempting to gain entry to elected positions at the local body elections and how their views should be given no air time. On Newstalk ZB this afternoon, host Simon Barnett took a call from someone defending not only these “extremists” right to stand, but demanding it. He explained that only by hearing what they have to say, and what they stand for, can society decide it’s wrong and not vote for them. Barnett got agitated. He questioned the caller about someone who proffered homophobic or Islamophobic views and essentially said this speech should be banned, and this pretend person should be prevented from standing if espousing such hatred.

Yes, he was serious.

I was discussing last night’s news story with my wife. I said to her, in a somewhat angry state because she was tending to take the side of the “banners”, that it is impossible to educate children on right and wrong unless and until we hear the views of the “extremists”. How is it possible to know Hitler’s views are repulsive, and his actions abhorrent, unless both are written about and taught? How can I explain to my make believe young son that what Hitler did all those years ago, and what Tarrant did and said in 2019, was evil, wrong and repulsive unless there is an open debate around such views and actions and I/we can teach our children how wrong this is? Simply put, we cannot.

This is why the cancel culture is going to ruin the very outcome those pushing the culture cancel want.

If we, as a country/society, allow this to continue we will succumb to a pile of State-fed propaganda, or misinformation. Sean Plunket came across it yesterday:

I agree with Lucia Maria in this post. I have been writing on political blogs since about 2004, so 18 years or so. I have studied politics and watched it since about 1996. I have never experienced the degradation of a free society more than I have in the last 2-3 years: I think this is the most serious issue facing this country.

Unless we have politicians in this country willing to promote and advocate for extremists to espouse their views, we will end up with a society of violence by extremists.

As Mike Bush put it this morning, in order to plan and respond for the future, “We need to know what is going on”. I expand that to what is being said.

Where did Wokeness come from?

Is the title of an interesting article at the City-Journal website by one Theodore Kupfer.

It may have started in the USA, but its roots are varied.

He reviews the leading theories, which I’ll summarise here:

• Idealist
  “the offspring of long-gestating intellectual trends”.
  
• Psychological
  Either a quasi-religion “filling a spiritual vacuum in American life” or “a byproduct of the infantilization of young Americans”.
  
• Materialist
  “woke capital” finding money making opportunities in fads like ESG or “woke labor” – “a glut of well-educated but insecure white-collar workers use their control over corporate resources to push a political agenda that they not only agree with but also depend upon for job security”.
  
• Legalist
  “Civil rights laws intended to combat discrimination growing cancerously into a set of legal doctrines that actively promote it.”

Kupfer doesn’t think that any of these has sufficient explanatory power by itself, which I agree with. It’s all of them:

Left with a set of theories that don’t seem to work on their own but complement each other well, one could embrace a synthesis: a perfect-storm view, in which all these different phenomena happen at once.

Thus, a certain brand of overprotective parent raised a generation of kids susceptible, in an era of declining religiosity, to morally urgent ideologies.

The theory-suffused academy was happy to supply such an ideology, which these kids took up with gusto upon arriving on campus, despite its evident shortcomings.

When they graduated and started entering the white-collar work force, litigation-averse corporations – already seasoned in adjusting their behavior to comply with civil rights laws – happily indulged the political demands of this socially engaged class of workers.

And, thanks to the immense cultural power of well-educated Americans and the economic power of large companies, that ideology became increasingly visible, and eventually all but inescapable.

And as I often say, theories, fads and trends that emerge in America spread elsewhere fast, at least in the Western world. I already made reference to this in a comment on my own post about the slowly growing pushback by gays and lesbians against the Trans movement, which comment was to this link:

The police removing lesbians from a pride parade.

The pride movement no longer supports gay people. pic.twitter.com/GklUgAp6xg

— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) August 27, 2022

Shame on the British Police (again: see Will be I arrested now, or later?).

Also see this article in the British Spectator, Why are lesbians no longer welcome at Pride:

Whilst Pride became populated with floats carrying drag queens resplendent in tassels, glitter and sequins, with rollerskating nuns following behind, lesbians sought to continue to remind the world that there were real issues to be fought, such as women losing their children to violent men because of anti-lesbian bigotry in the family courts; compulsory heterosexuality and the pressure to marry men and have babies, and a total lack of understanding that women have the right to control our own sexuality.

Lesbians have had enough, as we saw from the Cardiff parade yesterday. If gay men wish to turn what used to be an honourable protest march into nothing more than a street party, and include kinksters and cross dressers in the rainbow flag, that’s up to them, but lesbians have a lot of work left to do.

As Angela Wild, a founder member of GTLO told me, they protested the march to highlight the appalling treatment of lesbians by the queer-identified crowd, and the climate of sexual coercion that lesbian have to navigate daily. ‘The way we were treated, both by the LGBT crowd and the police who refused to let us march and failed to protect us is a clear reflection of the current anti-lesbian image brought by trans activists,’ says Wild.”

Welcome to Straight World, sweetie – or should I say “Cis-gendered” World – including all the standard agitprop strategies and tactics you’ve employed for decades now. Something, something Ouroboros.

Transi Tipping Points

A transi tomb was a rather strange church monument for the dead of the Middle Ages . It had sculptured bodies showing them in their two forms; on top was how they were seen in life; beneath was how they were seen in death, a decayed corpse.

In this respect the LGBTQ+ movement is also finding itself subject to the transience and vanity of mortal life as the original LGB part find themselves increasingly at odds with the “T’s & “Q’s” who have glommed on to the movement in the last decade, as described by Bruce Bawer:

Years ago, gay magazines and organizations routinely conveyed the message that, as a gay man, I was part of something called “the gay community.” Then, at some point when I wasn’t looking, apparently I was adopted into something called “the LGBTQ+ family.” 

Meaning that in the view of the formerly gay and now LGBTQ+ establishment—the leaders of groups like the HRC and GLAAD, editors of magazines like Advocate and Out, and assorted authors and activists and academics, all of them on the Far Left—gay men like me aren’t just chained at the hip to lesbians and bisexuals; we’re also intimately lassoed to “queers” (which can mean anything), to individuals who identify themselves with some newfangled label like “nonbinary” or “genderqueer,” and, yes, to transgender people. 

Bawer points out that this is far from being its original issue of gender dysphoria, a long identified mental issue where men think they’re woman and women think they’re men (“Key word: think.“), and that what is being dealt with now is a transgender ideology that extends far beyond that into things like “nonbinary,” and “gender fluid” (male one day, female the next):

Indeed, the current trans line on same-sex attraction and opposite-sex attraction is that both are transphobic—that it’s bigotry for a straight man or a lesbian, for example, to refuse to sleep with a trans woman (i.e., a biological man)

(Note this illuminating detail: on the one hand, trans people demand that, in determining their “gender identity,” we rely not on biology but on their accounts of what they “feel”; on the other hand, they contend that persons to whom they’re attracted must yield to their demands for sex. Their feelings, then, are of infinite value, while ours don’t matter in the least.) 

That’s actually a standard feature of the entire oppressed/oppressor basis of Woke and Identity Politics, whether we’re talking about sex, gender, race or anything else. Bawer goes into the history of how LGB got “T”, “Q”, and “T+” added. I saw one example of this several years ago when I was subscribing to the Apple +streaming network and I noticed that the “Gay and Lesbian” category of films and TV suddenly changed to LGBTQ.

As another article points out this sort of “change” began to be just as superficial in real life. We were no longer talking about mature adults making painful decisions to undergo drugs and surgery to change themselves, as had been the case for decades:

Wendy Carlos and Jan Morris come immediately to my mind. M-to-F, as was most often the case, historically. Both appear, in images discoverable on the internet, to present convincingly as female the last time anyone paid attention. Such is not often the case with individuals in a more recent surge of M-to-F transsexuals. Seriously – if you’re going to go all out claiming to be a female, guys, can’t I demand that you work harder at it? You know – extensive surgical body modification, makeup, hairstyling, presenting at least the superficial appearance of being the fair delicate flower of womanhood?

Even worse has been the F-to-M stuff, with order-of-magnitude increases in the number of teenage girls apparently convincing themselves that they’re boys, and unlike the Will Thomas’s of this world (yes, I’m “dead-naming” the narcissistic, egoistic POS) these girls are all in for the surgery and the drugs:

Being a teenage female in puberty is a miserable business, even more so now; battered from every side by the availability of grotesque porn, and the temptations of being validated by peers and supportive authority figures that all those doubts and stresses will go away once you take all kinds of hormones, cut off your breasts and excise your uterus, and have some surgeons build a quasi-penis from flesh sliced elsewhere on your body. Troubled teenage girls are so vulnerable to peer pressure, now that social media has turned the dial up to eleven.

Ugly stuff. That article points out the obvious aspects of the trans movement; that this all seems very much like past fads such as the recovered memory and Ritual Satanic abuse insanity of three decades ago, but also that, unlike those and other fads, this stuff is not reversible. Chemical and surgical mutilation can’t be walked back. To that end Bawer likens it more to “the act of self-harm known as cutting, which seemed to reach a peak of popularity a few years ago.”

Tipping Points?

So has a tipping point been reached? Hard to say yet, but there are certainly some very big cracks starting to open up – although that’s yet to reach our MSM and “Entertainment” industry figures, or our politicians, especially here in New Zealand. However:

A most unforeseen development is in the rebellion of parents and alums of a very upper-caste all-girls school against the decision by the school to admit biological males who claim that they are really girls.

That’s in the USA. Meanwhile in Britain was something more important:

“On the heels of the ordered closure of the infamous Tavistock gender clinic in London, which offered ‘gender-affirming care’ and puberty blockers to thousands of children over the years, news has broken that roughly 1,000 families will file a medical negligence lawsuit against the clinic.”

About bloody time!

Bawer points out that people are starting to lose their tolerance for the trans minority because – despite claiming to be cruelly oppressed – they have been acting like toxic, authoritarian bullies. And quite a few of these people losing patience with trans world are gay people:

To this end, concerned British gay and lesbians have founded the LGB Alliance, on whose website you can read “that sex is binary, female and male, and that (for the vast majority of people) sex is determined at conception, observed at birth (or in utero), and recorded.” Heresy! LGB Alliance co-founder Bev Jackson, now 71, is a veteran gay-rights activist and woman of the Left, having become the spokesperson for Britain’s Gay Liberation Front way back in 1970.

There are plenty of others it would seem, judging by these comments on “#LGBdroptheT”, which has been trending on Twitter:

• “the Ts are abusive, gay denying, homophobic misogynists.”
• “the trans movement [is] full of satanic, grooming, pro body mutilation dictators.”
• “The T hitched a ride a few years back, invited itself for dinner, and is trying to make out that it always lived here. It didn’t. Pride marches, protests, and LGB rights happened WITHOUT the T. I remember—I was there. I also remember the T wasn’t.” 
• “They latched themselves onto our movement and became a parasite to the equality we fought SO hard for. They’re ungrateful, smug little bastards that need to go. Fight your own battles and leave us out of the whole drag queen story time shit . . .We didn’t sign on for this shit. We don’t want kids groomed . . . You took advantage of our good will. It’s gone too far.”

Ouch. Admittedly some of this is self-preservation, as the gay and lesbian community find themselves getting dragged under in an atmosphere of fear and loathing they thought they’d escaped.

Then there’s the Gays Against Groomers, a new American group, which had “over 63,000 followers” on Twitter:

Gays Against Groomers is a coalition of gay people who oppose the recent trend of indoctrinating, sexualizing and medicalizing children under the guise of “LGBTQIA+.” . . . This includes drag queen story hours, drag shows involving children, the transitioning and medicalization of minors, and gender theory being taught in the classroom. 

The [transgender] activists, backed by school boards, government, woke media, and corporations, have been speaking on our behalf for too long. When fighting for equality, our goal was to successfully integrate ourselves into society, but now these radicals aim to restructure it entirely in order to accommodate a fringe minority, as well as seek to indoctrinate children into their ideology. 

We’re saying NO.

Matt Margolis wrote about them at PJ Media, and two days later. Twitter permanently banned them, which ties in with the following cartoon that led to its originator (not Hayward) being banned from Twitter for inciting “hate”.

WRT to the gay community getting the blame for a lot of this – gay marriage being argued as an example of a slippery slope argument being correct – Bawer makes this point:

Yes, you can blame the tiny handful of far-left gay activists who, when the gay-rights struggle was over, refused to close up shop and instead—eager to keep raking in the cash—cynically retooled their organizations so that instead of promoting gay equality they were pushing trans ideology. Hell, those activists never cared for the “assimilationist” goals of most gay people in the first place, and therefore took like ducks to water to the idea of using transgenderism to upend social norms.

But those activists aren’t the only guilty parties in this story. Trans mania would never have taken hold throughout the Western world if not for straight people—disproportionately white liberal women of a certain age—who let themselves be convinced by the mainstream media that the only proper response to transgender ideology was to embrace it unquestioningly.

It’s heterosexual women like these, not gays, who are escorting children to the chopping block—children who, if left alone, would almost certainly have grown into gay adults.

“White Liberal women of a certain age”, eh? Yeah, I know more than a few of them, and they’re also the strongest supporters of President Biden and Jacinda Ardern. Funny that.

Hairy Maclary goes feral

.

Whether as a parent or grandparent, many Kiwis will have read the Hairy Maclary books to children over the last three decades, enjoying the fun of the rhyming language.

There’s also all of Hairy’s friends, Hercules Morse (“as big as a horse”), Slinky Malinki (“Blacker than Black”) and Scarface Claw (“the toughest Tom in town”) among them.

Well guess what sports fans? The American disease of Wokeness continues to arrive here, now with the message that all those characters are not Diverse enough (Equity and Inclusion to be named later):

… a study from Perth in Western Australia has taken aim at several children’s books including Hairy Maclary, suggesting they “perpetuate outdated stereotypes”.

The study by senior childhood researcher Dr Helen Adam of Edith Cowan University looked at several books including …

Critical Theory got its start in literature of course, tearing down everything it could as it “de-constructed” great works from Austen to Tolstoy, so it’s not surprising that they’ve chewed down into children’s books and finally got to the most isolated nation on Earth.

“Oh for goodness sake,” Dodd told RNZ. “I have actually got a female… I’m just looking at the pile of books I’ve got on the table at the moment… I’ve got Susie Fogg [A Dragon In a Wagon] and also, one has to remember that lady dogs have certain times when they’re not supposed to be out gallivanting anyway,” she added.

Woah there! Introducing biology into the argument? That’s a fail right from the start. Clearly Ms. Dodd is not familiar with her Critical opponents, who are turfing biology out the window along with every other “norm” they can.

She’d have been much better off mocking these assholes. Fortunately someone else decided to do the work for her, complete with the picture at the top of the post, with a wonderfully accurate rendition of Hairy in our bold new world. You wanted Diversity? You’ve got it:

With Hercules Morse at the gas and the wheel,
They were all set up now to break in and steal.
With a bang and a crash, they smashed through the glass,
The alarm’s shrill blare meant they had to be fast!
Straight for the till, all nasty and sneery,
Cash into a bag, went Hairy Maclary.
But the whole haul of ciggies of course,
That was the prize for Hercules Morse.

BTW, this isn’t going down well with a small group of the Left; The NZ Left are too busy cancelling Hairy Maclary for woke dogma to help you right now.

Well yes. that’s true. The author is “Bomber” Bradbury, angry as usual that all this woke shite is diverting people away from The Truth Of Marxist Dialectics. But you have to love the self-deception involved there as he headlines his article with a cartoon he’s used several times and which was first created over a decade ago during the GFC.

Identity Politics theory is entirely a construction of the Left over the last fifty years, and the only times I’ve seen the Corporate sector appropriate it has been when outfits like Gillette, Nike, Disney, Hollywood and many others employed it, DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) and its bastard child “Woke” to actually attack that portion of their own customer base that is traditional and conservative.

Bang that drum, Bomber

Over at The Daily Blog, Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury has being going apeshit on the abortion issue since SCOTUS dropped its ruling that booted both the Roe (’73) and Casey (’92) decisions, throwing the law on abortions back to the fifty US states to decide.

What issue you may ask? That’s the US. This is New Zealand. True, but by my count “Bomber” has now written something like half-a-dozen posts trying to link the decision to the National Party here and in particular to the Great Christian Ogre that apparently is National leader Chris Luxon.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Dear oh dear, oh dear. Those polls showing the slow deflation of the Jacinda balloon and her Party must be keeping Bradbury awake every night, as well as the ongoing collapse of our healthcare, education, social welfare and law and order systems that promises more fail and even lower polls leading up to the next election. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

As even some of his Lefty commentators have tried to explain to him – repeatedly – those problem areas are too big to ignore or deflect from, not to mention that Luxon strikes much of the right wing as a Wet, Woke drip who has already dumped his Christianity in the box marked “personal” and who will be silently “opposed” to whatever other Culture War crap the Left decide to pull in NZ from here on (“the National Party does not do culture wars”.)

However, “Bomber” is not listening: drowning men usually don’t, as witnessed by him refusing to publish my cheerful and erudite comments on his posts. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Aside from the desperate stupidity of his ploy there’s also the usual amount of hysterical garbage and double standards. The following has become a favourite over at TDB:

“THEY LIED”, scream the left, both here and in the USA, as they lambast the four latest GOP-nominated justices to get on the Supreme’s bench.

There’s a couple of problems with that, starting with the fact that if Supreme Court decisions were buried in the aspic of precedent and stare decisis, then terrible rulings like Plessy v. Ferguson (segregation), or merely legally weak ones like Bowers v. Hardwick (gay sex), Baker v. Nelson (gay marriage), Wolf v. Colorado, and many others, would never have been reversed.

Originalists such as Justice Antonin Scalia argue that “Stare decisis is not usually a doctrine used in civil law systems, because it violates the principle that only the legislature may make law.”^[62] Justice Scalia argues that America is a civil law nation, not a common law nation.

The second problem is the usual double standards of the Left, in this situation something called The Ginsburg Rules. These were crafted up in 1993 by none other than one Senator Joe Biden for the purpose of protecting Clinton’s SCOTUS nominee, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from being questioned too closely about her radical past positions on various legal issues. There was also the Model Code of Judicial Conduct:

Canon 5 of the Model Code, among others, forbids judges or judicial candidates from indicating how they will rule on issues likely to come before the courts or making any statement that would create the appearance they are not impartial. This rule is critical to an independent judiciary. Justices must remain open-minded when an actual case comes before them. They must not even hint how they would rule.

It all worked like a charm:

Sen. Leahy asked about the religion clauses of the First Amendment. Ginsburg responded simply: “I prefer not to address a question like that.” Leahy pressed for her interpretation of Supreme Court precedent on the subject, but Ginsburg again demurred: “I would prefer to await a particular case.” 
…
Sen. Strom Thurmond asked whether Ginsburg thought states could “experiment with and provide for diverse educational environments aided by public funding.” Ginsburg refused to give an answer: “Sen. Thurmond, that is the kind of question that a judge cannot answer at-large.” 
…
Ginsburg refused two senators’ requests to address homosexual rights. “[A]nything I say could be taken as a hint or a forecast on how I would treat a classification that is going to be in question before a court.” In fact, she exercised the Rule to avoid answering any questions relating to sexual orientation: “I cannot say one word on that subject that would not violate what I said had to be my rule about no hints, no forecasts, no previews.”

All bullshit of course. As with the recent conservative justices everybody knew damned well how Ginsburg was going to rule on such issues, that was why she was selected in the first place. To be fair to her it would have been interesting to ask what she thought of Roe since she (later) went on record about how legally weak it was. Still, she would never have overturned Roe or Casey, which was the point for the US Left.

No, Trump’s nominees did not lie, they merely followed the precedent of Ginsburg and Canon 5.

BTW, that article is dealing with the Robert’s nomination in 2005, by which time several Democrat Senators had stated that they weren’t going to follow the Ginsburg Rules or Canon 5 when it came to GOP nominated Justices.

I know. I’m shocked to learn that too! This is my shocked face.

Keep banging that drum “Bomber”.

Cancel Kulture and the tools it uses.

And one of those tools has been Twitter.

Here’s one way that Cancel Kulture can be made to work, and has worked on a number of people, especially in show business.

It’s quite simple: you just reach back into the past of that person, find something that’s “problematic” by today’s standards – problematic is a great word in that it’s not a direct attack but implies that a problem exists with the target of the word – and use that standard combined with a gathering wildfire of outrage on Social Media, followed by the MSM, to force the target into groveling apologies, most of which don’t work, the target gets de-platformed anyway.

This is what happened to Oscars host and comedian, Kevin Hart, three years ago. That was the end of that high profile job, and pretty much his career. The same stunt has been pulled on nobodies as well, like the young woman who lost her university place when a former high school classmate published an old Tweet of her celebrating getting her drivers licence at the age of 16 by repeating the line of a famous rap song (all the rage with her generation at the time) that included The Word That Can Get You In Trouble (unless you’re a rap artist).

Recently it was tried against the famous American comedian Steve Martin, because of a forty year old sketch he’d done on Saturday Night Live. Stephen Green at PJMedia takes up the story:

“Steve Martin” briefly trended on Monday after Silver Age Television tweeted the anniversary of King Tut’s debut on SNL. It trended because some zero-humor wokester forced it to trend. But only briefly. Mediaite did its best to generate heat with this headline yesterday:

Steven Martin’s ‘King Tut’ Sketch from 1978 Sparks Twitter Debate on Cultural Appropriation.

Steven Martin? Anyway, as the story made clear, there wasn’t even so little as a “Twitter debate.” The worst Mediaite could find was two barely-critical tweets by a couple of low-follower Blue Checks.

The Twitter Outrage Machine was cranked to life, then almost immediately ran out of gas. Maybe it’s because Twitter spent Monday outraged about the Elon Musk buyout and didn’t have time to worry about Martin.

Excellent news, but how did that little wokester actually get “Steve Martin” to trend in the first place, lighting a spark as it were?

“They do it,” Dice explained, “to create a self-fulfilling prophesy. Twitter manually inserts a topic on the list. People see the topic and think everyone is tweeting about which “caused” it to trend, so people *start* tweeting about it, and *then* the issue goes viral.”

Easy peasy. Japaneasy.

Oooo. Is that racist? Or culturally inappropriate?

Well anyway, after delving into yet another aspect of the grim, toxic underbelly of the politically correct Left, have a laugh at Steve Martin’s original sketch:

It’s a good thing George Carlin is dead

That was one message from Bill Maher’s take on the impact of Cancel Kulture in his world of using humour to stick it to powerful people.

I haven’t covered The Slap Heard Around The World because it’s just more of Hollywood being awful, but this time in a petty way that amounted to them eating their own as well as being yet another black mark for the Oscars. IMHO it was not as bad as the crap they churn out for us to watch. And now I have Maher referring to it anyway, except that his angle isn’t the screaming about violence, toxic males or the hypocrisy involved but what it says about how the US Left is handling humour nowadays, with another in his series of Explaining Jokes to Idiots (bonus points for the shoutout to the famous Seinfeld episode, The Magic Loogie, with “back and to the left”, itself a Black Comedy parody of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK).

It’s a good thing George Carlin is dead because today, the seven words you can’t say on TV are “Jada, can’t wait for “G.I. Jane 2.” pic.twitter.com/1oHU9A3eIF

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) April 9, 2022

If you think that it trivialises Cancel Kulture in focusing on its effects on jokes instead of Very Serious Ideas then you probably don’t know about this from 2021:

A nonprofit organization that major U.S. tech companies rely on for content moderation is expanding the scope of content it will blacklist on social media platforms.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism will expand its database of terrorist content to cover content shared by white nationalist and alt-right users, Reuters reported Monday. Tech companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Twitter, rely on the forum’s database to automatically remove inappropriate content. Experts worry that the forum’s lack of transparency could cause some users to be unfairly censored.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism was created in 2017 to censor content from U.N.-designated terrorist organizations. The forum’s board is advised by the European Union’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs, which recently released a report entitled “It’s Not Funny Anymore: Far-Right Extremists’ Use of Humor.”
…

More in that link, although it’s mostly not about humour.

The worst is when the comics censor themselves, when they become Woke, which seems to be what’s happened to one of Maher’s famous compadres, Jon Stewart.

The liberal comic retired from his “The Daily Show” perch in 2015, spawning tributes from across the media landscape. He changed the face of late night TV, they cried, and they were right. For better and much worse.

His impact, from his liberal take on the news to his bleeped profanity shtick, became part of the late night playbook.

Hell, I used to laugh along with The Daily Show as well, even as he took shots at the Right (like Maher does) to a far greater degree than he did at the Left.

But I did not appreciate the fact that after basically destroying what was a very good show of Left vs Right political and ideological argument, CNN’s Crossfire – by going on it in 2004 and attacking the folks there as unserious hacks, saying it was a show that “hurt America” by treating serious ideas in a (too) humorous way – Stewart’s own show simply carried on pushing little but the Left’s line while the rest of the media environment collapsed into the same echo chamber:

Is the media landscape Stewart helped create better for it, where Brian Williams regularly engages in Stewart-like snark (he called Ron Johnson a Russian asset the other day for reading a Federalist article into the record) and Tucker Carlson is the biggest name as a solo act in cable news?

In a context in which so much ink is dedicated to the concept of silos and the elimination of common space between right and left — and I mean the real right and left, not David Brooks and Maureen Dowd — do we honestly want a world where there is no space where these warring sides meet to do rhetorical battle?

The answer is: of course not. It’s much, much worse. The inability to have a space where such debates play out, and the inability of existing entities to provide such a space, has led directly to a degradation of our political conversation and a lack of familiarity with even the most basic version of the other side’s perspective on the world.

And as Jim Treacher memorably noted of Stewart’s routine:

Once I saw through his Clown Nose Off/Clown Nose On routine — “You should listen to me because what I’m saying is important, but I’ll brush off your rebuttal by insisting I’m just a comedian” — it was like the optical illusion with the cows. It might take you a minute to see it, but once you do, you can’t unsee it.

Since Treacher’s analysis in 2013 people have looked at the famous old Crossfire segment and observed that Stewart was pulling the Clown Nose On / Clown Nose Off routine there as well.

There was some of this also when he recently appeared on an episode of one of his Daily Show proteges, Late Night With Stephen Colbert, and spoke some common sense about the Wuhan Lab Leak theory, which had Colbert back-peddling fast until he finally asked Stewart how long he’d been working for Senator Ron Johnson (boom-tish for Liberal snark – see above).

Sadly he seems to have gone full Clown Nose Off as a result of savage attacks by Woke critics of his old show and more recent works:

The woke mob, which will “resurface” the past to attack people in the present, deemed his “Daily Show” writers room insufficiently diverse. And Stewart, rather than defend his team or their work, groveled for forgiveness. That must have stung, but it’s more likely another moment left a palpable scar on his psyche.

That other moment was a movie called “Irresistible” that Stewart made about politics and which lampooned both the GOP and the Democrats. That was not acceptable:

It’s cowardly to make a film lampooning Democrats as out of touch rather than Republicans as unquestionably evil, but this is what “centrism” is these days, and that’s the “both sides” ideology that Stewart espoused back during his days on The Daily Show, and that’s the shit that doesn’t fly anymore.

War, baby! Götterdämmerung. The final fight between the forces of Good and (Unquestionable) Evil.

This is why his latest show, “The Problem with Jon Stewart” on the Apple+ streaming network, had an episode titled “The Problem with White People.” that ended up with Andrew Sullivan, Mr Gay Mrriage himself, a voter of Obama-Obama-Clinton-Biden in the last few years, being attacked as a racist by Stewart’s guest, with Stewart in full, Clown Nose Off agreement:

I just assumed he wouldn’t demonize or curse at a guest; he would moderate; he would entertain counter-arguments; he would defend fair play. After all, this was the man who had lacerated Crossfire for bringing too much heat and not enough light. He believed in sane discourse. He was a liberal, right?

He is indeed, it’s just that poor old Sullivan, despite writing about Woke issues, still thinks that Liberals fit his stereotype, the comfortable picture he has of them, and of himself:

At that point, it became clear that Stewart was not conducting a televised debate, but initiating a struggle session. The point of the session was not to discuss anything, but to further enforce the dogma he had pronounced. So I found myself in the equivalent of one of those workplace indoctrination seminars — in which any disagreement is regarded as a form of “hate” or “ignorance.” But worse: I was in a struggle session with a live mob sitting in, cheering and jeering, which Stewart led and orchestrated. For good measure, Stewart called me a racist and told me I was not “living in the same fucking country as we are,” and went on to angrily call me a “motherfucker.”

Sullivan also got this treatment from the guest (predictably a Liberal White Woman):

I did not come on this show to argue with another white man. That’s one of the reasons we don’t even engage with white men at Race2Dinner, because quite honestly if white men were going to do something about racism, you had 400 years. You could have done it.

A key attack point. If it sounds familiar that’s because we’ve heard it in New Zealand also, in relation to White Colonialism, and you will hear more of it in the near future. Sullivan finishes his detailed piece on the history of White and Black race in the USA by drawing the obvious parallel with Stewart’s ethnicity:

… the trope of a malign racial force existing through history across time and space is one Jon Stewart might have once recognized before he joined the woke cult. I wonder what he would have said if someone had come on his old show and said, “I did not come on this show to argue with a Jew,” or “every single Jew upholds these systems,” or “it doesn’t matter what a Jew’s politics are, he’s still a Jew, and therefore a racist”. What if she had bragged that her organization wouldn’t even engage with Jews because they were so toxic. And what if that person had looked straight at a Jewish guest of Stewart’s when she said it? What would he have said?

Somehow I don’t think it would be: “If I could finger snap, I would finger snap right now.”

Amid all this fighting was news of a stunning counter-attack. After asking his 80 million Twitter followers what they thought of the status of free speech on the platform, and receiving an overwhelming response that it was poor, Musk bought a 9.2% stake in the company for US$ 2.9 billion dollars, making him the largest shareholder and likely catapulting him onto the Board of Directors.

We’ll have to wait and see what influence he has. While significant, the shareholding is far short of control and BOD members are not management; they don’t manage the day-to-day functions of the company. On top of that, as this article pointed out before Musk pulled the trigger, there are a number of big roadblocks in returning Twitter to being the free speech platform it was a decade ago, and we know they exist because they are what changed it. The article details four steps and shows how they worked before and could work again – possibly destroying Musk in the process.

1. Blame the platform for its users.
2. Coordinated pressure campaigns
3. Exodus of the Bluechecks
4. Deplatforming

Still it was nice to see that it triggered an immediate meltdown across the Lefty Social Media Sphere, especially among the Twitter workers themselves.

Maybe they should hire Bill Maher to provide worker tension-relief exercises once a week. They might even learn to laugh.

The Samizdat remains the same

The failure of new generations of Leftists to actually build anything that could be described as Left-wing has started to be noticed by at least some Leftists.

Here in New Zealand the likes of “Bomber” Bradbury have been railing about the uselessness of Ardern’s Labour government to actually solve homelessness, and poverty, despite almost five years in power, the last two with an overwhelming majority in Parliament. Moreover “neo-liberal” capitalism is still here, smashing house prices through the roof and killing young people’s chances of home ownership – with all that implies for starting families.

Moreover, Bradbury notes that even as these failures pile up the fighting over woke politics grows ever more vicious:

I see a woke activist base who act more like a cult protecting dogma than agents of progressive change. I see a Green Party that is next to fucking hopeless on anything other than the delivery of woke empty gestures welded to their own middle class pretensions.
…
The material issues that truly matter have been dumped in favour of middle class identity politic virtue signals that are parroted by the Twitter mob and anyone who breathes differently gets cancelled.

But it’s a global phenomena. Environmentalist Michael Shellenberger, in his article, What happened to ‘Yes we can’?, bemoans what has happened to the dream of progressives on issue after issue:

For all of my adult life I have identified as a progressive. To me, being a progressive meant that I believed in empowerment…But now, on all the major issues of the day, the message from progressives is “No, you can’t.”

From climate change to drugs to homelessness and racism, Shellenberger sees what Bradbury sees, an ideological and political movement that has gone off the rails:

The reason progressives believe that “No one is safe,” when it comes to climate change, and that the drug-death “homelessness” crisis is unsolvable, is because they are in the grip of a victim ideology characterized by safetyism, learned helplessness, and disempowerment.

This isn’t really that new. Since the 1960s, the New Left has argued that we can’t solve any of our major problems until we overthrow our racist, sexist, and capitalistic system. But for most of my life, up through the election of Obama, there was still a New Deal, “Yes we can!” and “We can do it!” optimism that sat side-by-side with the New Left’s fundamentally disempowering critique of the ­system.

That’s all gone. On climate change, drug deaths, and cultural issues like racism, the message from progressives is that we are doomed unless we dismantle the institutions responsible for our oppressive, racist system. Those of us in Generation X who were raised to believe that racism was something we could overcome have been told in no uncertain terms that we were wrong. Racism is baked into our cultural DNA.

So too does the more hardline Leftist, Matt Taibbi in this article, The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama, which starts off in typical Taibbi fashion:

On the road from stirring symbol of hope and change to the Fat Elvis of neoliberalism, birthday-partying Barack Obama sold us all out

Ouch! It only gets nastier from there as he starts with Barack’s fabulous 60th birthday bash in his “Who’s Afraid of Climate Change” $12 million mansion in Martha’s Vineyard:

… advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.
…
There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.

I must admit that I laughed out loud at that last bit. Closer observers of Obama had already noticed that aspect of his personality years ago:

Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding, for a buck.

Heh. Trump spoke a great many truths about The Establishment in D.C.

How do these Leftist betrayals keep happening? The thing that Taibbi, and the German Critical Theorists and Gramsci and all the rest of these fabulous Marxist theorists continue to miss is that no matter how you dress up the pig, it’s still a swine, as Tom Wolfe waspishly noted years ago in The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America, writing about Solzhenitsyn’s coming to America:

With the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslo­vakia in 1968 it had become clear to Mannerist Marxists such as Sartre that the Soviet Union was now an embarrassment. The fault, however, as tout le monde knew, was not with socialism but with Stalinism. Stalin was a madman and had taken socialism on a wrong turn. (Mis­takes happen.) Solzhenitsyn began speaking out as a dissident inside the Soviet Union in 1967. His complaints, his revelations, his struggles with Soviet authorities—they merely underscored just how wrong the Stalinist turn had been.

The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to con­centration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had im­mediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.

I always have to laugh at the trajectory that Leftists follow in this descent. People like Gorbachev and Dmitry Volkogonov at least had the excuse of having grown up in a brainwashed system, but not their Western counterparts:

Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!

Intellectuals in Europe and America were willing to forgive Solzhe­nitsyn a great deal. After all, he had been born and raised in the Soviet Union as a Marxist, he had fought in combat for his country, he was a great novelist, he had been in the camps for eight years, he had suf­fered. But for his insistence that the isms themselves led to the death camps — for this he was not likely to be forgiven soon. And in fact the campaign of antisepsis began soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. (“He suffered too much — he’s crazy.” “He’s a Christian zealot with a Christ complex.” “He’s an agrarian reaction­ary.” “He’s an egotist and a publicity junkie.”)

I vividly recall that this was still the standard take on the man when I was at varsity in the 1980’s.

Solzhenitsyn’s tour of the United States in 1975 was like an enormous funeral procession that no one wanted to see. The White House wanted no part of him. The New York Times sought to bury his two major’ speeches, and only the moral pressure of a lone Times writer, Hilton Kramer, brought them any appreciable coverage at all. The major tele­vision networks declined to run the Solzhenitsyn interview that created such a stir in England earlier this year (it ran on some of the educa­tional channels).

And the literary world in general ignored him completely. In the huge unseen coffin that Solzhenitsyn towed behind him were not only the souls of the zeks who died in the Archipelago. No, the heartless bastard had also chucked in one of the last great visions: the intellec­tual as the Stainless Steel Socialist glistening against the bone heap of capitalism in its final, brutal, fascist phase. There was a bone heap, all right, and it was grisly beyond belief, but socialism had created it.

But the betrayals of Obama and Clinton and Blair and Brown and Ardern (“Wonder Woman”) and Clark and Lange and all the rest, don’t matter. The next leader of the Centre-Left parties will be hailed as the new saviour, and the entire hideous personality-cult-plus-central-control process will start all over again. These are the same people who will tell you earnestly to your face that there’s no way a modern Lenin, Stalin or Mao could arise because the Left would never make that mistake again.

The Zombie Returns

While the USSR collapsed in 1991 – fittingly on Christmas Day as if in a final tip-of-the-hat to the Christianity against which it had so long fought – and while this followed on from the collapse of all its little Mini-Me’s in Eastern Europe a couple of years earlier, there were still plenty of Marxists around, even if they seemed a little “off” from a traditional Marxist perspective:

Nominal communist regimes still exist, but they are knock-offs, systems determined to survive by being different. There is little Marx in China. Cuba also has gone to market to try to save itself. North Korea has enshrined Asian monarchy rather than European philosophy. But no one has attempted to remake Soviet communism.

Aside from those examples True Marxists (self-proclaimed) have soldiered on in the West, even gaining some traction with movements like Antifa and Burn Loot Murder, discontent with “neo-liberal capitalism” and certainly engaging in struggle sessions in many areas.

As this article, Zombie Marxism, makes clear, there’s a lot going on to once more modernise ancient Marxist ideas. That article looks at the two basic pathways to yet another socialist revolution: practical grassroots organising; and destroying a society’s ideas about itself. That last is mainly about Italian communist Antonio Gramsci:

Writing in the 1920s and ‘30s, after the failure by Italy’s workers to set up a communist state in 1918, Gramsci said the proletariat was consenting to his own enslavement. How so? He buys into the cultural trappings of his bourgeois oppressor—the church, the family, the nation-state, etc.

The communists at the turn of the 20th century had struck similar problems as the industrialised nations of Europe failed to undergo “natural” communist revolutions. Lenin’s answer was a Vanguard Party to lead the clueless workers. But Gramsci saw that outside of Russia that wasn’t working either. Something else was needed, and his key insight was that:

‘popular beliefs and similar ideas are themselves material forces.’ Gramsci upheld the assertion that a successful revolution would ultimately require the overthrow of the bourgeois state…However, because the capitalist hegemony does not function through state violence alone but that it also mobilizes civil society in order to promote oppressed peoples consent to and participation in the system, a successful revolutionary movement would first have to engage in a long-term effort to undermine that consent.

Screw economics in other words, the focus of Marx and Engels. Gramsci proposed that the things a civil society believes about itself, its culture, buttressed by its institutions, all the things that the oppressed foolishly believed in, would need to be torn down and rebuilt embedded with Marxist theory.

Which is where the German Critical Theorists come into the picture. They had the tools to enable the destruction, starting with the harmless, innocuous world of academic Western literature and then spreading beyond that to other parts of academia and from that into society, even into the ranks of the professional/managerial classes – with the NYT’s “educational 1619 Project, designed to tear down the myth of 1776 and replace it, being the most prominent example. As one modern Marxist, Harmony Goldberg, admiringly said:

“Revolutionaries would themselves have to engage in the long-term battle of ideas in order to clarify the need for revolutionary transformation.” All-out ideological war is needed. A crisis can be used to overthrow a society, but the long-term subversion of a culture must come first.

Remember that when you strike idiot Right-Wing politicians who insist that “they don’t do culture wars”.

Aside from the ideas needed to destroy all those things there’s also the practical organising – which is where the likes of Burn Loot Murder come into the picture (and here you were thinking they were about Blacks being brutalised by the Police). The creators of BLM are people like Alicia Garza and Patrice Cullors:

 In 1996 Harmony Goldberg founded the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL). This is the same place where, seven years later, Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, then 22, began her Marxist training [in “community organising”].
…
In Cullors’s case, the ideological mentor was Eric Mann. He is a former member of the Weather Underground who founded the Labor-Community Strategy Center in LA (which Mann jokingly calls “the University of Caracas Revolutionary Graduate School”).

These bastard organisations may die off, as the murderous Weather Underground did after the early 70’s, but their poison lives on to create new horrors like BLM. Mann had already developed the key insight that in America Gramsci’s cultural attack would work best if it was boiled down to racism, the great fault line in America. The training of Cullors, Garza and others like them would also focus on a group of people not necessarily “working class”:

Early on, Mann settled on Los Angeles bus riders as more easily organizable and indoctrinated than factory workers. They were more destitute, more black, Latino, and Asian, and more female, than the average worker. “At a time when many workplaces have 25 to 50 employees, an overcrowded bus has 43 people sitting and from 25 to 43 people standing,” he wrote. “Ten organizers on ten different buses can reach 1,000 or more people in a single afternoon,” That’s why his Center pioneered the creation of a Bus Riders Union.

Remember this also the next time you read the likes of old time Leftist Chris Trotter sneering about the mindless, lower-class of the “lumpenproletariat“, as he did about the Wellington protestors. By contrast Mann and company see such people as equally valuable for their revolution, perhaps more so than the Working Class that buys into the capitalist dream.

So far it’s been quite successful: Critical Theory has laid waste to academic fields, and the most prominent outcome of BLM has been the Defund the Police movement. The article also points out the MSM has been brought into the picture in just the last few years, with a tenfold increase in the use of CRT terms such as “White Privilege”, “Systemic Racism”, “Racial Privilege and so forth. How helpful!

The thing is that the likes of Lenin, while they may not have been as focused on this stuff as a primary driver of revolution, effectively ended up doing the same thing after the revolution, as a rather surprising modern political figure confirms:

Cambodia’s Year Zero was not new or unique.

As much of a concern as these efforts are in their trashing of our Western civilisation, they’ve also turned out to be almost as much of a disappointment as their forebears in building the new Heaven On Earth, luckily without as much blood being split. For example the Defund The Police movement is rapidly collapsing as frightened Democrats back away from the massive surges in crime that have resulted in cities stupid enough to follow the advice of BLM, and US university enrolments are in long-term decline in areas such as English, Sociology, and History where Critical Theory has dominated.

But like old Communism, even as they fail they can be incredibly damaging. In the article Confessions of a student Marxist, we get some insight into this wasteland, as described a man who spent his teenage years “immersed in Marxist and anarchist circles and literature”, before getting to Cambridge University where he’s thrilled to discover others like himself and it all gets very exciting – for a while:

The college was a bucket of crabs and happiness itself suspect, a mark of privilege, as with the rugby lads who had the audacity to actually enjoy themselves. When there was laughter it was heavy and jarring, filled with irony and bitterness, never light or free. …Though we were aware of our enormous privilege we contrived to see our time at Cambridge as some grim fate foisted upon us.
…
Unhappiness brings with it power over others. Where compassion is the highest virtue, this power is almost limitless. Misery also provides the motive to wield this power, and mental blindness to one’s own culpability in its exercise. 

Eternally oppressed victims. There can be no uglier oppressors. He writes about seeing clips of people expressing their mental distress of oppression – “They are there in the voice, constantly on the point of breaking, in the incredulous, widening eyes, and in the earnestly furrowed brow” – and that when he sees BLM using the same “therapeutic language”, it makes his skin crawl.

Social theorist Mark Fisher described from first-hand experience the manipulation of this scene as a Vampire Castle which “feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups — the more marginal, the better — into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampire Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering — those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.” The Vampire Castle recruits on the promise of community and self-healing. The reality is an ouroboros of emotional manipulation…

Emotional manipulation has become the primary, in some ways the only, driver of our politics: Jacinda Ardern is a leading example, including the fact that she is a wealthy, Middle-Class person:

The emotional manipulation developed in elite institutions has developed a motte-and-bailey style of argument (superbly analysed by Jacob Siegel) which is impossible to push back against without seeming callous. And every institution, public or private, has simply buckled.
…
the embrace of this movement by the rich, and the profound philosophical break it represents with the old order, suggests it has a logic and a momentum of its own and its potential is without limit. It is a politics of negation and renunciation and there is no end-point. There is always more work to be done.

That part about the rich jumping onboard with the bullshit shows both its danger to Western society as well as it weakness. Critical Theory and all the Gramscian stuff is doing a great job of tearing things down, but when it comes time for building they’re still stuck with Marxism, which only builds vast systems of centralised command and control that degenerate and then collapse.

But in this case, the approach has also produced, not a generation of hardened revolutionaries but a bunch of privileged cry-bullies: emotionally fragile people who, like their theories, can tear down but not build.

Seemingly on the cusp of victory (Defund the Police) they crap out in the face of reality (increased crime), and in the case of even the trained Marxists, it turns out that they love money and owning houses, having bought into the cultural trappings of their bourgeois oppressors.

In the future everybody will be cancelled for 15 minutes

Even scientists with a great pedigree of credentials and research papers.

Like Robert Malone.

But when he began to speak up about the potential downsides of the mRNA-“spike protein” approach to vaccines, that was not acceptable to TPTB, even though it’s his field of expertise.

First he found podcasts involving him getting pulled from YouTube, and then even the supposed business-connecting site LinkedIn took their shot:

Malone pays for the premium version of LinkedIn for the biotech and government consulting business he runs, Just the News reports. That page remains intact, but its last post is three weeks old. 

“He was given no notice, no warnings” before he was removed on Tuesday, his wife Jill said. “He has a 10-15 year old account – has never even had a warning. 6,000 followers.”
…
“The historic record of what I have done, stated, figured out (and when) etc. over time is a key part of establishing my credibility and track record as a professional,” Robert Malone tweeted Wednesday. “And that has been erased completely and arbitrarily without warning or explanation.” 

Well at least he can still Tweet!

===========================

There was one piece of cancellation news that was funny. There’s an outfit called Right Wing Watch, which is dedicated to posting clips of conservatives saying things in an effort to get those conservatives de-platformed. Unfortunately they were a little too good at their job of pushing YouTube on those rules:

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

My, how schadenfreudialicious that is. Something, something reaping.… something something sowing…

But now that they’ve been kicked off of YouTube, they can simply go start their own multi-billion dollar video platform, right? I mean, that’s what the Left has continually told conservatives who complain about censorship online.

I think they’ll be fine. Once YouTube realises the political and ideological mistake of taking out one of their own, RWW will be allowed back.

===========================

The same might also be true for actor Tom Hanks. Early in June, Tom decided to sheer his experience and feelings about racism in American by publishing an op ed in the New York Times entitled “You Should Learn the Truth About the Tulsa Race Massacre,”, in which he confessed that he’d never heard of this during his 1950’s/60’s Whitebread schooling. Hanks has been activist (a quiet one) and a donor to many Democrat Party candidates and causes over the years.

But none of that was good enough for one Eric Deggans’, who used his platform on none other than NPR (National Public Radio, basically the equivalent of the NZR’s National Program) to unload in response, “Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It’s Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist”. Because you can never be good enough, especially in the eyes of a 55 year old Black man who specialises in “issues of race and social justice”:

“The toughest thing for some white Americans … is to admit how they were personally and specifically connected to the elevation of white culture over other cultures,
…
His work, so often focused on the achievements of virtuous white, male Americans, may have made it tougher for tales about atrocities such as Tulsa to find space.”

The revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.

Perhaps the best response to Deggan’s bullshit is this article from Frontpage by Danusha Goska. It’s lengthy but you should read it. She makes several important points but it was this one that struck me, based on her experience teaching and living in Africa and the reality of limited good:

An insight into why villagers resisted change, including change that might save their own lives, was provided by the fate of one villager, a man I knew personally. When development workers advised the locals on how to improve their agricultural output, he carefully applied every suggestion. His farm prospered and he enjoyed a much higher yield than any of his neighbors.

His neighbors burned his farm down. That’s limited good. This man, by increasing his yield, had monopolized all the good to be had in that village, and his action would result, his neighbors believed, in their farms doing poorly.

It applied to other things in the village too, even beauty. That’s what Deggan is actually putting forward for the US and other Western societies:

Deggans is back to that limited good, zero-sum worldview that insists, falsely, that one man’s success equates to the next man’s failure. If Tom Hanks has two cows, Eric Deggans can’t have any cows. If Hanks’ farm is doing well, Deggans’ farm will wither. If Hanks’ baby is attractive, Deggans’ baby must be ugly.

The “solutions” offered also amount to the same thing; burning the farm to the ground:

For Hanks to atone, he must lower himself, and elevate black people in the place he previously occupied. That’s being an anti-racist. That’s Ibram X. Kendi. That’s the “8 White Identities” chart that says that the only good white is a white who participates in the abolishment of whiteness. And it is a Maoist struggle session. Deggans calls for “Hanks and other stars to talk specifically about how their work has contributed to these problems and how they will change.” This is the self-accusation that occurred during Maoist struggle sessions. The less successful, fueled by their envy, publicly humiliate the more successful.

Goska also makes the point that should be obvious:

Deggans can read white people’s minds. White people all think alike. And Deggans can speak for them. Any similar set of statements by a white man about black people would be taboo.

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Lastly, there are places where the reverse is happening, with opposition ideologues taking over their opponent’s world, as Daniel Greenfield points out:

When Sultan Doughan signed a hateful letter falsely claiming that Israel and Zionism were based on “Jewish Supremacy”, a term popularized by Neo-Nazi leader David Duke, that ugly rhetoric wouldn’t have attracted much attention in an antisemitic time… except for one thing.

Doughan is a Muslim postdoctoral associate at Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣