Bari Weiss Enumerates the Core Beliefs of Wokeness – Critical Race Theory – Social Justice

I've been posting ad nauseam about Wokeness over the past 18 months because it starkly contradicts many of my core beliefs. And it starkly contradicts basic principles deeply cherished by what I believe to be the great majority of Americans. I have categorized dozens of my articles with the label Wokeness. You can read them all by clicking on this link. I have carefully documented not only theories about why this movement has gained traction. I have also carefully collected many instances in which people have hurt, belittled, fired, tormented and rattled each other by embracing Woke Ideology while throwing long-established beliefs (including basic Enlightenment Principles and Martin Luther King's "content of character" aspirations into the trash.

Bari Weiss has be speaking loud lately, rallying the great majority of people--they tend to be afraid to speak up--to say what they believe and to not feel compelled to say things that they don't believe. It all sounds so simple, but the Twitter mobs are loud and vocal and they have thoroughly intimidated those who are in charge of our meaning-making institutions (e.g., schools, media, government, social media). Weiss argues that if we all just start speaking up, this insanity will diminish greatly because it will encourage others to speak up too. Here is an excerpt from Bari Weiss' article at Commentary. It is titled "We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage: Say no to the Woke Revolution." Here is Wokeness in a nutshell from her article:

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.

In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.

In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. . . . In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. In this ideology, intentions don’t matter... In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, the course must have been defective.... In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your fathers. In other words: You are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion or your class....In this system, we are all placed neatly on a spectrum of “privileged” to “oppressed.” We are ranked somewhere on this spectrum in different categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Then we are given an overall score, based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are tainted.... Racism has been redefined. It is no longer about discrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups....skeptics of any part of this radical ideology are recast as heretics. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots, subjected to boycotts and their work to political litmus tests.

How in hell's name could anyone be drawn to such stupidity? Weiss points to several causes that have made fertile ground for this dysfunction:

All of this has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning. A pandemic of distrust. It has taken place against the backdrop of the American dream’s decline into what feels like a punchline, the inequalities of our supposedly fair, liberal meritocracy clearly rigged in favor of some people and against others.

Continue ReadingBari Weiss Enumerates the Core Beliefs of Wokeness – Critical Race Theory – Social Justice

The Relationship Between Truth and Courage

Nietzsche recognized that without courage we cannot have truth:

How much truth can a spirit stand, how much truth does it dare? For me that became more and more the real measure of value. Error (belief in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice.

Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, comes from courage, from harshness towards yourself, from cleanliness with respect to yourself. ..

Bari Weiss' newest article discusses the relationship between courage and truth. The title: "Some Thoughts About Courage We are living through an epidemic of cowardice. The antidote is courage."

Courage means, first off, the unqualified rejection of lies. Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob. And do not genially accept the lies told to you. If possible, be vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false. Courage can be contagious, and your example may serve as a means of transmission.

When you’re told that traits such as industriousness and punctuality are the legacy of white supremacy, don’t hesitate to reject it. When you’re told that statues of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are offensive, explain that they are national heroes. When you’re told that “nothing has changed” in this country for minorities, don’t dishonor the memory of civil-rights pioneers by agreeing. And when you’re told that America was founded in order to perpetuate slavery, don’t take part in rewriting the country’s history

. . . .

As Douglas Murray has put it: “The problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected. The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence and slinking away of everybody else.”

What caused our leaders to buckle under? To say things they don't believe and to refuse to say things that they know are true? Weiss blames the lack of courage:
There are a lot of factors that are relevant to the answer: institutional decay; the tech revolution and the monopolies it created; the arrogance of our elites; poverty; the death of trust. And all of these must be examined, because without them we would have neither the far right nor the cultural revolutionaries now clamoring at America’s gates.

But there is one word we should linger on, because every moment of radical victory turned on it. The word is cowardice.

The revolution has been met with almost no resistance by those who have the title CEO or leader or president or principal in front of their names. The refusal of the adults in the room to speak the truth, their refusal to say no to efforts to undermine the mission of their institutions, their fear of being called a bad name and that fear trumping their responsibility — that is how we got here.

I'll conclude with this excerpt from a conversation between Bari Weiss and Brian Stelter:

Continue ReadingThe Relationship Between Truth and Courage

Rogan Pushes Sanjay Gupta to Cough Up the Truth About Gupta’s Employer, CNN

Sanjay Gupta is one of the good guys. During the pandemic, he has provided a lot of good information regarding COVID. That said, Joe Rogan had him on the ropes as Gupta tries to defend the misconduct of CNN, Gupta's employer. Well worth watching and excellent analysis by Krystal and Saagar.

Continue ReadingRogan Pushes Sanjay Gupta to Cough Up the Truth About Gupta’s Employer, CNN

A New Well-Documented Love Story: Democrats and America’s Spy State

Two related things of note. First, Glenn Greenwald notes that Democrats are falling in love with America's Deep State:

What the fuck is happening to Democrats?  We have tons of recent evidence telling us that the deep state exists and that it comprises anti-democratic poison coursing through our country's arteries.

Matt Taibbi writes:

Six or seven years ago, “Deep State” was a term you would only see in left-leaning media. Bill Moyers explored the theme on his site from time to time, and when The Nation asked Edward Snowden about it, he said, “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.”

The “deep state” was on the liberal left’s front burner then because a spate of horrendously ugly revelations put it there. We learned via Snowden that the NSA was collecting the communications of people all around the world in secret (Carollo might want to mark down that congress wasn’t informed) in a program the U.S. Court of Appeals just last year declared illegal.

We found out top intelligence officials like CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to congress, among other things about the warrantless surveillance program, and got away without perjury charges despite a furious outcry from legislators (another useful factoid for Carollo, on the oversight front). We learned about the CIA’s systematic use of torture techniques, ranging from anal feeding to threatening to rape and murder relatives to induced hypothermia, another fun set of pastimes the agency decided not to burden congress with knowledge of. . . . Pre-Trump, all of this spoke to the worst nightmares of American liberalism. Millions of Boomers and Gen-Exers alike had grown up worshipping at the altar of Miranda and Mapp v. Ohio, believing the ideas of due process and transparency inviolable.  . . .

Young or not, the average commentator now is both committed to forgetting the sordid history of agencies like the CIA, and perfectly equipped mentally to keep that commitment. . . .

Then Trump arrived. Almost immediately, it was obvious his historical destiny was to be the best thing that ever happened to the secret services. In the same way hydroxychloroquine became snake oil the instant Trump said he was taking it, the “Deep State” became a myth the moment Trump and his minions started talking about it. Deep state warriors like Brennan, Clapper, and former CIA chief Michael Hayden, held in near-universal disdain before as some of the world’s most loathsome people, people so morally ugly it showed on their hideous faces, became immediately respectable by rebranding themselves as Trump critics. The early Trump years, in fact, made heroes of every tumescent peeping-Tom creep and spook in the federal register, now cast in the press as democracy’s infantry, saving the world through intercepts, informants, and leaks.

In a flash, programs that terrified American liberals previously, like FISA, became weapons of Holy War, in the ongoing campaign to Oust Trump via a succession of investigations and impeachment bids. When it came out that a known FBI informant spied on presidential candidate Trump, pundits not only cheered, they refused outright to call it spying.

. . . .

The cultural memories of the coming wave of media professionals extend back a few years at most. Most have read thousands more tweets than book pages. Their opinions come mainly from the dung-pile of popular news and are in sync with most Democrats, whom polls consistently show to have strong majority favorable views of the CIA and the FBI, a dramatic turnaround from the pre-Trump years. In fact, now that the War on Terror has ostensibly been reconfigured to target gun owners, white supremacists, and “insurrectionists,” they can scarcely remember why they ever felt negatively about the NSA or the folks at Langley, which of course makes them perfect for their jobs. In a dystopia, a good memory is just an inconvenience.

If this is not enough to make you cry a river, Taibbi reminds us that the liberal news media is infested with spooks:
Now, just like any other tinpot third-world country, we get our news directly from secret agents. I made a list once:

Continue ReadingA New Well-Documented Love Story: Democrats and America’s Spy State

FAIR Sends Point-by-Point Rebuttal to National School Boards Association (NSBA) Letter Requesting Federal Law Enforcement Involvement in School Board Proceedings

On September 29th, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) published a letter addressed to President Joe Biden, requesting “Federal Assistance to Stop Threats and Acts of Violence Against Public Schoolchildren, Public School Board Members, and Other Public School District Officials and Educators.” NSBA's dishonest request to President Biden resulted in Attorney General Merrick Garland's Oct 4 misguided memorandum, stating that the Justice Department “is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate.”

FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism) offers this detailed and much-needed point-by-point rebuttal to NSBA's dishonest letter to President Biden.

FAIR is a grassroots nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans, and promoting a common culture based on fairness, understanding and humanity.. See FAIR's recent announcement for more information on the purpose of FAIR and recent efforts of FAIR to combat Woke racism.

Here is a quick link to FAIR's October 13, 2021 Point-by-Point rebuttal to NSBA's letter to President Biden.

Continue ReadingFAIR Sends Point-by-Point Rebuttal to National School Boards Association (NSBA) Letter Requesting Federal Law Enforcement Involvement in School Board Proceedings