Forces Distorting Public Discourse
Woke takeover and the blackmail factor.
In the year 2000, the Neocons took over the US after a contested election. The courts decided George Bush should be president even though voters favored Al Gore with their votes. The Neocons went on to use 9/11 as a pretext to consolidate their power, both domestically and abroad. Even now, more than 20 years later, this faction of the control regime remains influential.
In 2020, a new group began taking over large segments of culture. I call them the Woke, though they may or may not self-identify as Woke. Fifteen years ago, Woke mostly meant accepting people and perspectives that differed from your own. But during the pandemic, Woke metastasized into something more threatening. It became a group that imposed identity politics on everyone, prescribed speech, favored increased government censorship, and used cancellation to punish its enemies.
Claudine Gay exemplified Woke culture while president of Harvard, a position from which she recently resigned in disgrace. According to a Public article:
Gay created, or oversaw the creation of, a "Glossary of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB) Terms," that she and the rest of Harvard’s management expected faculty and students to use. The glossary proposed a racist and sexist hierarchy whereby "victims" are morally superior to "oppressors," and the two groups are determined by race, sex, and other genetic factors. ... And in 2020, as Dean of Arts and Sciences, Gay created a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage to reduce the imagery of white men on campus and rename rooms and programs out of the irrational idea that white supremacy is somehow promoted when past scholars are memorialized in paintings and sculptures.
Although Gay was eventually forced to resign over seemingly credible allegations of plagiarism, demands for her ouster began after she testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, at a hearing about antisemitism on college campuses. According to NBC News:
When Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., asked the three leaders if a student calling for the genocide of Jews would break college codes of conduct, they repeatedly deflected the question. Gay said "it depends on the context" and added that antisemitic rhetoric would be classed as "bullying, harassment, intimidation."
Gay's refusal to condemn calls for Jewish genocide may have been an accident, but it may also have been calculated to show tacit support for the Harvard student groups that said Israel was entirely responsible for the October 7 Hamas attacks.
Woke Identity
The Woke formula for identity is fundamentally disempowering and has increasingly been weaponized in recent years. Racial identity. Gender identity. Sexual identity. These things have become the exclusive focus of the Woke, which seeks simultaneously to elevate individuals with the correct identities into positions of power and to punish those with incorrect identities for their perceived misdeeds against those with the more desirable identities.
This new formulation of identity has replaced more traditional formulations of identity, which were often based on religion, vocation, and geography. This replacement of the basis for identity has transformed what defines us. Instead of being defined by our actions and choices, we're now defined by things we have no control over. These involuntary identities are then used to prescribe political and social action.
The Woke emphasis on trans identities is pronounced. Big Pharma profits immensely from this. Here's some of what I said about that back in July:
Only 1 in 50 kids identifies as trans and up to 90% of these kids grow up to change their minds about transitioning. If these figures can be believed, that's a very small number of trans people in the population. But since gender dysphoria diagnoses tripled from 2017 to 2021, there is reason to believe the trans population is experiencing a period of explosive growth. While some of this growth can likely be attributed to increasing societal acceptance of trans people, the coinciding growth in gender reassignment drug sales and surgeries suggests that Big Pharma and industrial medicine have a strong interest in popularizing transgender identities.
Notably, class identity is nowhere in the conversation. There was a time when class identity supported class solidarity. Now, people seem much more likely to regard their socioeconomic peers as undesirables. They don't want class solidarity. They want upward mobility.
In 2022 it came out that nonprofits across the US had been paralyzed by the endless petty grievances of the Woke within their ranks. Opposed to free speech, the Woke crowd imagines that governments and big companies should be responsible for the actions that media consumers take after consuming the media. Even in extreme cases, I disagree with this premise. If someone reads racist tweets and then goes out and does a mass shooting, the fault clearly lies with the shooter, not the media platform or the author of the tweets.
Although the Woke are relatively powerless politically, they harm their perceived enemies socioeconomically by canceling them. Cancellation is a digital mob punishing a person for being accused of some offense. Anyone can make the accusation for any reason and the truth of the matter is unimportant to the mob. Justice is irrelevant to this process. The whole point is for members of the mob to signal their virtue to each other by harming the accused.
The threat of cancellation by the Woke looms particularly large in academia. I personally know more than one college professor who has been accused of racism or transphobia simply for teaching their standard course materials. These unwarranted accusations are widespread and have produced a culture of fear. Now many are too afraid of running afoul of cancel culture to oppose the Woke's crusade.
The overall thrust of this crusade can be seen throughout society. Toppled statues, historical revisionism, censorship, prescribed speech, and condemnation of the nuclear family all describe a movement trying to totally remake culture, which is exactly what aspiring totalitarian regimes have always done.
The Blackmail Factor
While the Woke use the public release of damaging information about their enemies to shape public opinion, other influential forces in society prefer to keep such information secret so it can be used to manipulate events from the shadows. The control regime has long used blackmail to advance its agenda. The FBI famously used blackmail against civil rights leaders like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As increasingly sophisticated surveillance technology has made the secret collection of compromising information easier and easier, blackmail may be much more commonplace today. One state representative recently went on record suggesting that many Republican officials were casting votes in accordance with the wishes of anonymous blackmailers.
Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee spoke out against the blackmail operations influencing government votes.
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1738035368790831166
And remember the high end brothel ring in DC and Boston that was recently busted? This operation collected surprisingly detailed information about its clients, presumably for the purposes of blackmailing some of them later. Now, Daily Mail is saying that the operation may have been run by a foreign government for espionage purposes.
A list of some of the late Jeffrey Epstein's associates was just publicly released. The names come from court proceedings related to Epstein's child sex trafficking ring. One of the main purposes of this operation was probably blackmail. According to the New York Post, "Epstein wired his mansion with hidden cameras, secretly recording orgies involving his prominent friends and underage girls. The ultimate purpose: blackmail, according to court papers."
Conflict Profiteers
Throughout society, Woke intimidation is stifling free and open communication. Within the halls of power, an unknown number of decision makers are being controlled by blackmail. Censorship and propaganda permeate the news. Everywhere we turn, ideologues are transforming their perceived enemies into scapegoats on whom the troubles of our broken society can be blamed. Here's a quote from a Charles Eisenstein post about it:
For the right, it is Antifa, Black Lives Matter protesters, critical race theory academics, and undocumented immigrants that represent social chaos and the breakdown of values. For the left it is the Proud Boys, right wing militias, white supremacists, QAnon, the Capitol rioters, and the burgeoning new category of "domestic extremists." And finally, defying left-right categorization is a promising new scapegoat class, the heretics of our time: the anti-vaxxers.
None of this bodes well for public discourse. Many interconnected crises are unfolding throughout society and reasonable conversations about these crises are hard to have when surrounded by the noise of bickering ideologues. The alternative press sometimes cuts through this noise, but it still has major blind spots. Like anything related to the Middle East.
Even though our right to speak and publish freely is legally protected, the whole idea of freedom is fast becoming a quaint relic of a bygone era. An unknown number of people no longer even voice their opinions for fear of accidentally causing an offense that attracts socioeconomic retribution. Computer programs monitor us and police our speech on social media. Intelligence agencies and the military work with Big Tech and shadowy corporate entities to silence dissenting views on the internet.
This is the landscape we must traverse if we want to get from here to some place that makes more sense. Everywhere we look, there are problems with solutions that inevitably begin with getting together and figuring things out. Politically, diplomacy is always preferable to conflict. In all other areas of society, diplomacy is also preferable to conflict. Of course, conflict profiteers disagree. And they seem to be the ones in charge of everything.
My low opinion of the Woke doesn't come from anger or outrage. It comes from disappointment. The Woke are people to whom fairness matters and it's disappointing to see their energies dispersed in such a counterproductive way. To my way of thinking, there can be no fairness without freedom.
In the not-too-distant past, there was a progressive left that championed issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion while challenging corporate interests and opposing the war machine. Then, around 2016, with the establishment politicians and media conspiring to silence populist voices, the left threw away all of the stuff about challenging power and condemning war. Today, the left is all about absolute conformity to the norms favored by the control regime. And the Woke do their best to enforce these norms throughout society.
For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels and my Hive blog.