Wilfred Reilly Weighs in on the Election Results

Many "people of color," including professor of political science, Wilfred Reilly, have spoken. Reilly is one of my favorite voices over the last five years of woke nonsense. His 2020 book, Taboo, is excellent, as is his 2019 book, Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War.

Fun fact from 2021 article about Wilbert Reilly, "Kentucky State professor making waves in conservative media, intellectual circles":

His dissertation at Southern Illinois University involved taking to task a statistic widely circulated to support the idea of white privilege.

“He asked a bunch of white guys in Queens how much they would have to get paid to be Black and the average answer was $50 million,” Reilly said. “His conclusion was that this represents the value of white status institutionally and structurally — that we live in a racist society.”

Reilly’s dissertation found that the average answer among minorities as to how much they would have to get paid to be white at the time was $80 million.

And now I can't help thinking of the time that Ibram Kendi destroyed the foundation for most of his racism arguments:

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Hollywood’s Struggles with Wokeness

Michael Shellenberger's article at Public. "We Are Only Now Starting To Recover From The Madness

Its political power has broken, but Wokeism is still ruining the culture."  Excerpt:

“Complete intolerance became almost a religion,” wrote [actress Justine] Bateman, “and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others.”

Hollywood is not only one of the most status-obsessed neighborhoods in the world, it is also one of the most Woke. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Pictures mandated racial quotas. CBS required that 50% of its writers’ rooms be non-white. And a culture of fear of saying the wrong thing spread.

“This was the era of trying to exercise control over those who dd not want to follow the crowd,” wrote Bateman, “and has their own ideas about what they needed to do.”

At this point, Bateman circles back to the demands of the SAG actors union, which protested studios efforts to replace them with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

“This dampened our culture and innovation, bringing people to even think that generative #AI, a regurgitation of the past, was actually our cultural future. When you starve a society of those called to be independent thinkers and cultural and intellectual innovators, you rob that society of any forward movement.”

What Bateman is saying is that Wokeism had so destroyed cultural innovation in Hollywood that many of its leaders, executives, and creative geniuses had become resigned to AI taking over the role of real humans.

Bateman isn’t alone in her assessment. “Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” the writer and director of HBO’s “The White Lotus” told fellow Gen Xers Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik of The Free Press.  “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma.”

Bateman put her finger on the essential status-obsessed nature of Wokeism, which had been taken up most vigorously by Millennials but enabled by the “Me” generation of Baby Boomer liberals.

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Recommended Documentary Focused on the Flaws of DEI: “Am I a Racist?”

What's wrong with simply rewarding people based on merit? What's wrong with hiring and promoting those who excel? Many prominent DEI advocates are horrified by this idea. They divide all people into two (count'm, two) "colors" and urge us to treat people in special ways based on their "colors." In his the new documentary "Am I a Racist," Matt Walsh goes undercover to demonstrate many of the deep flaws of modern day DEI. This includes a surreal interview with today's best-known modern-day practitioner of racecraft, Robin DiAngelo.

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Political Power and the Need for Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff of FIRE:

In a democracy, the majority doesn’t need special protection for freedom of speech because their power is protected by the majority vote. The bully and the bigot easily get their way if they have the votes.

The fact is that only those with opinions that are unpopular with the majority or the ruling elite need the special protection of freedom of speech. It is not, in fact, a coincidence that the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s rights movement, and the gay rights movement (just to name a few) only really took off when the protections of the First Amendment became strongly interpreted beginning in the 1950s. Prior to that, without a strong First Amendment, those movements were easy to shut down.

But the powerful in higher education find this narrative inconvenient. This is because, frankly, they are unsatisfied with the amount of power they have over speech and thought (which is already immense, and regularly abused). They prefer a narrative in which they are still the underdog (which they've never really been) and still the hero (which they very rarely are). At the same time, they’d like to continue to censor “bad” speakers and “bad” speech — not just with new tools, but with a continued sense of self-righteousness about their authoritarian impulses.

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Mike Benz: It’s time to take apart the Death Star of government censorship.

I've followed Mike Benz for several years. He formerly worked in the US State Department. His analyses of the US censorship industrial complex are detailed and credible.

Question:

I want to ask you about the protections that we need for social media companies. How can we stop the government from being able to bully social media companies into censoring content that it dislikes.

Benz:

With control over the executive branch, it would be surprisingly easy not to take the whole thing out, but to devastate it in effectively a single blow. All you would need is an incoming day one executive order that prohibits government grants and contracts by any government agency to any outside group involved in regulating, flagging or downranking so-called "disinformation." It does what the Supreme Court should have done and said that the funding of censorship by the government is censorship by the government. So that Executive Order will allow you to go agency by agency and kill all of those grants and contracts that comprise the censorship industry. There are hundreds of 1000s of people now around the world, and 10s of 1000s of people here in the US whose full time--their paychecks, their livelihoods, their mortgages are effectively paid for by doing full-time 24/7 censorship work. This field did not exist eight years ago. It was created after the 2016 election as a response to Trump winning to stop a night like tonight where he might win again.

Continue ReadingMike Benz: It’s time to take apart the Death Star of government censorship.