Inconsistently Applied Principles of Woke Ideology Exposed by Student Reactions to Recent Gaza Events

At National Review, Charles Cooke's sharp-edged article invites us to exhale. We didn't believe most of the allegedly high-minded principles proclaimed by Woke Ideologists.  They didn't either. Here's an excerpt from "The Woke Code of Morality Was All Nonsense":

Pick, at random, a fashionable idea about the ideal limits of free expression, and you’ll observe that it has collapsed ignominiously into the dust. The prohibition on “tone policing”? Gone. The injunction to “believe all women”? Evaporated. The insistence that “silence is violence,” that “neutrality is complicity,” or that institutions are thus obliged to speak out about any injustice that they might see? Defunct. Obsolete. Kaput. In the annals of bad human ideas, has an ideology ever been as swiftly hollowed out as was this one?

After noticing the hypocrisy, Jonathan Haidt also weighed in, making reference to the release (this week) of a new book by Greg Lukianof and Rikki Schlott, The Canceling of the American Mind (2023). First of all here's how Haidt and The Canceling define cancel culture: "efforts to silence people by threatening them with social death, unemployment, or physical harm for questioning orthodox beliefs or proposing heterodox theories. " Haidt's comment:

The Canceling was a darn good book when I read a draft last spring, in order to write the Foreword for it. It’s an even better book now that the world has been treated to the shocking spectacle of so many university presidents remaining silent, or issuing only vague and cautious comments, in days after the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel. Their collective reticence stood in stark contrast to the speed with which so many had offered expressions of solidarity or shared grief whenever an election or court case went the “wrong” way in the years since 2014. (In general I think universities should embrace the “Chicago Principles” and commit to institutional neutrality. See Jeff Flier’s recent application of these principles to the current situation. But if university leaders made so many pronouncements on “controversial” issues before October 7, then they should have made a strong one on October 8.)

Why did so many leaders take so long to say anything strong or (seemingly) heartfelt about the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the holocaust? Why did so many wait a few days to see which way the wind was blowing before augmenting their initially tepid statements? I see nothing to suggest antisemitism; I see everything to suggest fear.

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Quotes for Our Troubled Time

"Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

"It should be blindingly obvious by now that the identity politics of race, religion and ethnicity are deeply poisonous, blinding us from seeing our common humanity. The left and the right are equally capable of weaponizing identity to justify violence." Lee Fang

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” Selwyn Duke

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TED Gets Caught Rigging the Conversation. The Story of Coleman Hughes

Coleman Hughes discusses his mistreatment by TED with Glenn Greenwald on System Update. Also discussed, TED's betrayal of its stated principles. It's clear that modern day TED would have done the same with Martin Luther King, given that Coleman's talk was in favor of color-blindness.

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Planned Parenthood’s Motivated Diagnoses Rapidly Turning Teenagers and Young Adults into the Opposite Sex

Wow. It only took 30 minutes for Planned Parenthood to figure out that the main reason for the psychological distress of a young autistic adult was that he was born in the wrong body. I wonder how many regressive stereotypes they employed to figure this out before issuing a long-term prescription for infertility–inducing cross-sex hormones.

Aaron Sibarium's article is titled "Planned Parenthood is Helping Teenagers Transition After a 30 Minute Consult. Parents and Doctors are Sounding the Alarm." Excerpt:

In late July, while his parents were out of town and after he had come of age, Fred went to Planned Parenthood, which prescribes hormones to any legal adult without a letter from a therapist or a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The only requirement is a brief consultation, usually with a nurse practitioner, about the drugs’ effects, which range from mood swings and male pattern baldness to permanent infertility.

How brief? Fred arrived at his local clinic, on North Fullerton Ave. in Montclair, New Jersey, at around 11:00 a.m., according to phone tracking data his parents used to monitor his whereabouts. By 11:39, they received a text message from CVS: Fred’s estrogen prescription was on its way. Instead of a months-long evaluation by expert psychiatrists, a nurse practitioner had, in little over 30 minutes, prescribed their special-needs son a powerful drug without their knowledge or consent.

"It’s criminal what Planned Parenthoods all over the country are doing," Fred’s mother, a New Jersey pediatrician, said. "And most people have no idea this is happening."

For corroboration, read this article by Abigail Shrier.

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New Book by Yascha Mounk: The Identity Trap

I received my copy of Yascha Mounk's new book yesterday and it is excellent. Here's the blurb from the publisher:

Blurb from the publisher regarding Yascha Mounk's new book, "The Identity Trap."

For much of history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. It is no surprise that many who passionately believe in social justice came to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity to resist injustice.

But over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minority groups has transformed into a counterproductive obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new ideology aiming to place each person’s matrix of identities at the center of social, cultural, and political life has quickly become highly influential. It stifles discourse, vilifies mutual influence as cultural appropriation, denies that members of different groups can truly understand one another, and insists that the way governments treat their citizens should depend on the color of their skin.

This, Yascha Mounk argues, is the identity trap. Though those who battle for these ideas are full of good intentions, they will ultimately make it harder to achieve progress toward the genuine equality we desperately need. Mounk has built his acclaimed scholarly career on being one of the first to warn of the risks right-wing populists pose to American democracy. But, he shows, those on the left and center who are stuck in the identity trap are now inadvertent allies to the MAGA movement.

In The Identity Trap, Mounk provides the most ambitious and comprehensive account to date of the origins, consequences, and limitations of so-called “wokeness.” He is the first to show how postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory forged the “identity synthesis” that conquered many college campuses by 2010. He lays out how a relatively marginal set of ideas came to gain tremendous influence in business, media, and government by 2020. He makes a nuanced philosophical case for why the application of these ideas to areas from education to public policy is proving to be so deeply counterproductive—and why universal, humanist values can best serve the vital goal of true equality. In explaining the huge political and cultural transformations of the past decade, The Identity Trap provides truth and clarity where they are needed most.

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