August
Metanoia
Caucasian is now out .
The word 'caucasian' should be banned say Cambridge and UCL scientists | Daily Mail Online
The word 'caucasian' should be banned say Cambridge and UCL scientists | Daily Mail Online
wwkirk
Divine
Since this seems to be focused on technical scientific discourse, I don't have a problem with the proposal per se. To my knowledge, racial, ethnic, geographical, and species designations have always been altered from time to time with respect to humans and non-humans. I do object to the so-called anti-racist rationale, however, as the historical origin of a term does not actually carry forward into its present day meaning unless its overt form would be immediately discerned as offensive. And this certainly doesn't apply to the word Caucasian. Let them seek a reason based, empirical justification for replacing the term (in scientific contexts).
nivek
As Above So Below
nivek
As Above So Below
Try getting a paper written in informal english published in any respectable journal and watch the doors slam in your face lol...
...
Professors declare correct grammar is racist, no such thing as standard English at symposium
Leo Terrell slams professors who claim 'standard English' is racist: 'I find it insulting'
.
...
Professors declare correct grammar is racist, no such thing as standard English at symposium
Leo Terrell slams professors who claim 'standard English' is racist: 'I find it insulting'
.
nivek
As Above So Below
No comment to this madness...
...
PBS, Vanessa Williams spark backlash over ‘Black national anthem’
PBS has sparked tense backlash with its decision to have Vanessa Williams perform the "Black national anthem" during its July 4 coverage – with critics blasting the move as divisive and un-American.
Williams’ performance on the station’s annual Capitol Fourth program Sunday evening is intended to celebrate the recognition of Juneteenth’s establishment as a federal holiday.
"It’s in celebration of the wonderful opportunity that we now have to celebrate Juneteenth. So we are reflective of the times," the actress and singer, who was the first Black woman to win the Miss America Pageant, told the Associated Press.
"We are reflective of the times and I’m happy to be part of a tremendous show that the producers are aware and willing to make the changes that have happened within the past year and a half."
Her rendition of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" will not replace the U.S. national anthem, which will be sung by Grammy-award winner Renée Fleming, but it has still bitterly divided people on social media.
Lavern Spicer, a Republican candidate in Florida’s 24th District, who is Black, said the song could divide the country on a day people should be standing together.
"Vanessa honey, a BLACK national anthem is something a Black African Country would have, not a country like America that exists for everyone," Spicer tweeted.
Author Tim Young echoed Spicer’s concerns, tweeting: "Nothing will unite us more as a nation than separate but equal national anthems…"
"This isn’t unity… it’s division," Young reiterated in a follow-up tweet.
Jenna Ellis, the former Weld County, Colorado, deputy district attorney and Trump lawyer, invoked the words of the Pledge of Allegiance to show her frustration.
"We are ONE Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for ALL," Ellis tweeted.
"We’re witnessing the unraveling of E pluribus unum in real time," former CIA officer Brian Dean Wright fumed, referencing the traditional motto of the United States, which is Latin for "Out of many, one."
"The consequences will be dire," Dean Wright warned.
Other social media critics also railed against the decision to perform two anthems.
"I didn’t get the memo, we have a new anthem? And what was wrong with our original one?" one Twitter user responded to the announcement.
"What? I thought we were ALL Americans?! Now divided by color? What happened to one nation, under God, indivisible? Talk about dividing us…" another said.
Originally called "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the song was written by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900 and was popular among Civil Rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s.
A Capitol Fourth will air on PBS from 8 to 9:30 p.m. EST.
The 41st airing of the celebration program will also feature Jimmy Buffett, Gladys Knight and Train.
.
...
PBS, Vanessa Williams spark backlash over ‘Black national anthem’
PBS has sparked tense backlash with its decision to have Vanessa Williams perform the "Black national anthem" during its July 4 coverage – with critics blasting the move as divisive and un-American.
Williams’ performance on the station’s annual Capitol Fourth program Sunday evening is intended to celebrate the recognition of Juneteenth’s establishment as a federal holiday.
"It’s in celebration of the wonderful opportunity that we now have to celebrate Juneteenth. So we are reflective of the times," the actress and singer, who was the first Black woman to win the Miss America Pageant, told the Associated Press.
"We are reflective of the times and I’m happy to be part of a tremendous show that the producers are aware and willing to make the changes that have happened within the past year and a half."
Her rendition of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" will not replace the U.S. national anthem, which will be sung by Grammy-award winner Renée Fleming, but it has still bitterly divided people on social media.
Lavern Spicer, a Republican candidate in Florida’s 24th District, who is Black, said the song could divide the country on a day people should be standing together.
"Vanessa honey, a BLACK national anthem is something a Black African Country would have, not a country like America that exists for everyone," Spicer tweeted.
Author Tim Young echoed Spicer’s concerns, tweeting: "Nothing will unite us more as a nation than separate but equal national anthems…"
"This isn’t unity… it’s division," Young reiterated in a follow-up tweet.
Jenna Ellis, the former Weld County, Colorado, deputy district attorney and Trump lawyer, invoked the words of the Pledge of Allegiance to show her frustration.
"We are ONE Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for ALL," Ellis tweeted.
"We’re witnessing the unraveling of E pluribus unum in real time," former CIA officer Brian Dean Wright fumed, referencing the traditional motto of the United States, which is Latin for "Out of many, one."
"The consequences will be dire," Dean Wright warned.
Other social media critics also railed against the decision to perform two anthems.
"I didn’t get the memo, we have a new anthem? And what was wrong with our original one?" one Twitter user responded to the announcement.
"What? I thought we were ALL Americans?! Now divided by color? What happened to one nation, under God, indivisible? Talk about dividing us…" another said.
Originally called "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the song was written by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900 and was popular among Civil Rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s.
A Capitol Fourth will air on PBS from 8 to 9:30 p.m. EST.
The 41st airing of the celebration program will also feature Jimmy Buffett, Gladys Knight and Train.
.
AD1184
Celestial
Can you summarize what this is? Or screenshot it? Embedded Facebook content is only displayed when you permit its tracking cookies, which I haven't allowed.
nivek
As Above So Below
I posted the Facebook page from this article which summarizes what's being said...
Black Lives Matter Utah chapter calls American flag 'symbol of hatred'
...
nivek
As Above So Below
Scientists won't use insect name because it's a slur
(Excerpts)
On Wednesday, the Entomological Society of America announced it was removing “gypsy moth” and “gypsy ant” as recognized common names for two insects. For Ethel Brooks, a Romani scholar, the move is long overdue.
__________
The move by the entomological group is the first time it has removed a common name from an insect on the grounds that it is offensive to a community of people, according to representatives from the society.
“If people are feeling excluded because of what we call something, that’s not acceptable,” Michelle Smith, the society’s president, said. “We’re going to make changes to be a welcoming and inclusive society for all entomologists.”
.
(Excerpts)
On Wednesday, the Entomological Society of America announced it was removing “gypsy moth” and “gypsy ant” as recognized common names for two insects. For Ethel Brooks, a Romani scholar, the move is long overdue.
__________
The move by the entomological group is the first time it has removed a common name from an insect on the grounds that it is offensive to a community of people, according to representatives from the society.
“If people are feeling excluded because of what we call something, that’s not acceptable,” Michelle Smith, the society’s president, said. “We’re going to make changes to be a welcoming and inclusive society for all entomologists.”
.
wwkirk
Divine
An established Liberal Speaks out Against SJW-PC Madness
What Happened To You?
The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism
Andrew Sullivan
Jul 9
“What happened to you?”
It’s a question I get a lot on Twitter. “When did you become so far right?” “Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenicist?” Or, of course: “See! I told you who he really was! Just take the hood off, Sully!” It’s trolling, mainly. And it’s a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the kind of emotional blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses. But it’s worth answering, a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics. Because it seems to me that the dynamic should really be the other way round.
The real question is: what happened to you?
The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.
But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.
Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?
What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.
Get the Dish every Friday
We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.
Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.
This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.
The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).
A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing. The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations in the Atlantic and his subsequent, gut-wrenching memoir, “Between The World And Me.” He combined the worldview and vocabulary of CRT with the vivid lived experience of his own biography. He is a beautifully gifted writer, and I am not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to, in what many of his blog readers called his “blue period.”
The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.
In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)
And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.
What happened to me? You know what I want to know: What on earth has happened to you?
I have exactly the same principles and support most of the same policies I did under Barack Obama. In fact, I’ve moved left on economic and foreign policy since then. It’s Democrats who have taken a sudden, giant swerve away from their recent past.
At the moment, I’m recording an audiobook for a new collection of my writing, from 1989 - 2021, “Out On A Limb,” to be published next month. (More to come on that next week.) It covers the Obama years, including my impression in May 2007 that he’d be the next president and why I found him so appealing a figure. It’s been a shocking reminder of how our politics has been transformed since then:
My favorite moment was a very simple one. He referred to the anniversary of the March on Selma, how he went and how he came back and someone (I don’t remember who now) said to him: “That was a great celebration of African-American history.” To which Obama said he replied: “No, no, no, no, no. That was not a great celebration of African-American history. That was a celebration of American history.”
How much further can you get from the ideology of the 1619 Project — that rejects any notion of white contributions to black freedom? In his Jeremiah Wright speech, the best of his career, this is what Obama said of Wright’s CRT-inspired words, damning America:
They expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above
all that we know is right with America... The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.
This is what I still believe. Do you?
A plank of successor ideology, for example, is that the only and exclusive reason for racial inequality is “white supremacy.” Culture, economics, poverty, criminality, family structure: all are irrelevant, unless seen as mere emanations of white control. Even discussing these complicated factors is racist, according to Ibram X Kendi.
Obama was a straddler, of course, and did not deny that “so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” I don’t deny that either. Who could? But neither did he deny African-American agency or responsibility:
It means taking full responsibility for own lives — by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
To say this today would evoke instant accusations of being a white supremacist and racist. That’s how far the left has moved: Obama as an enabler of white supremacy. You keep asking: what happened to me? I remain an Obamacon, same as I always have been. What, in contrast, has happened to you?
Check out this really insightful interview of Wes Yang by Matt Taibbi. Yang beautifully explains the radical shift in elite opinion. He notes the ascending rhetoric: “So there’s a line in an n+1 essay, where the person is saying, ‘Oh, we are now menaced by whiteness and masculinity.’ Whereas in the past, we would have said, ‘Oh, we’re menaced by racism and sexism.’” He sees what this movement is about: the end of due process, the rejection of even an attempt at objectivity, a belief in active race and sex discrimination (“equity”) to counter the legacy of the past, the purging of ideological diversity, and the replacement of liberal education with left-indoctrination.
Yang sees the attempt to dismantle the entire carapace of liberal society and liberal institutions: “[The proponents of the successor ideology are] not trying to be malicious, but they are trying to basically annihilate a lot of the foundational processes that we depend upon and then remake them anew. You operate from the starting point that all the previous ideologies, methods, and processes are untrustworthy, because they produced this outcome previously, so we’ve got to remake all of them.” Precisely. This is a revolution against liberalism commanded from above.
Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone.
Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Non-violence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Color-blindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.
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It is absolutely no accident that this illiberal ideology has no qualms whatever with illiberal methods. The latter springs intrinsically from the former. Kendi, feted across the establishment, favors amending the Constitution to appoint an unelected and unaccountable committee of “experts” that has the power to coerce and punish any individual or group anywhere in the country deemed practicing racism. Intent does not matter. And the decisions are final. An advocate for unaccountable, totalitarian control of our society is the darling of every single elite institution in America, and is routinely given platforms where no tough questioning of him is allowed. He is as dumb as Obama is smart; as crude as Obama is nuanced; as authoritarian as Obama is liberal.
Or check out Kevin Drum’s analysis of asymmetric polarization these past few decades. He shows relentlessly that over the past few decades, it’s Democrats who have veered most decisively to the extremes on policy on cultural issues since the 1990s. Not Republicans. Democrats.
On immigration, Republicans have moved around five points to the right; the Democrats 35 points to the left. On abortion, Republicans who advocate a total ban have increased their numbers a couple of points since 1994; Democrats who favor legality in every instance has risen 20 points. On guns, the GOP has moved ten points right; Dems 20 points left.
It is also no accident that, as Drum notes and as David Shor has shown: “white academic theories of racism — and probably the whole woke movement in general —have turned off many moderate Black and Hispanic voters.” This is why even a huge economic boom may not be enough to keep the Democrats in power next year.
We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown. It nearly lost the Democrats the last election. Only Biden’s seeming moderation, the wisdom of black Democratic primary voters,and the profound ugliness of Trump wrested the presidency from a vicious demagogue, whose contempt for our system of government appears ever greater the more we find out about his term in office.
But as Wes Yang notes, Biden has also aided and abetted and justified this radicalism. He has instituted a huge program of overt government race and sex discrimination throughout every policy and area of government; he backs decimating due process for sexual accusations on campus; he favors abolishing religious freedom as a defense of anti-gay discrimination; he believes that gender identity should replace sex as a legal category, and gender identity should rest entirely on self-disclosure; he favors expediting and maximizing mass immigration, not stemming it. In Yang’s rather brutal assessment, for the hard left, “what they saw is that with Joe Biden, who’s this throwback figure, the activists could all rush to him and get most of what they wanted from him anyway.”
Does that mean we should support an increasingly nihilist cult on the right among the GOP? Of course not. Does it mean we should ignore its increasingly menacing contempt for electoral integrity and a stable democracy? Absolutely not. But one reason to fight for liberalism against the successor ideology is that its extremes are quite obviously fomenting and facilitating and inspiring ever-rising fanaticism in response. I fear the successor ideology’s Kulturkampf is already making the 2022 midterms a landslide for a cultish, unmoored GOP. In fighting S.I., we are also fighting Trump.
But I am not making a tactical argument here. I’m making a deeper moral argument. We can and must still fight and argue for what we believe in: a liberal democracy in a liberal society. This fight will not end if we just ignore it or allow ourselves to be intimidated by it, or join the tribal pile-ons. And I will not apologize for confronting this, however unpopular it might make me, just as I won’t apologize for confronting the poison and nihilism on the right. And if you really want to be on “the right side of liberalism,” you will join me.
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(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my review of the HBO miniseries “Mare of Easttown”; my conversation with “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua on the resilience of immigrants and the fragility of college students; yet more reader dissents over my writing on CRT; a few notable quotes from the week; a few notable views from reader windows; eight notable pieces from other substackers; your weekly dose of Mental Health Break; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
What Happened To You?
The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism
Andrew Sullivan
Jul 9
“What happened to you?”
It’s a question I get a lot on Twitter. “When did you become so far right?” “Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenicist?” Or, of course: “See! I told you who he really was! Just take the hood off, Sully!” It’s trolling, mainly. And it’s a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the kind of emotional blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses. But it’s worth answering, a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics. Because it seems to me that the dynamic should really be the other way round.
The real question is: what happened to you?
The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.
But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.
Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?
What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.
Get the Dish every Friday
We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.
Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.
This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.
The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).
A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing. The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations in the Atlantic and his subsequent, gut-wrenching memoir, “Between The World And Me.” He combined the worldview and vocabulary of CRT with the vivid lived experience of his own biography. He is a beautifully gifted writer, and I am not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to, in what many of his blog readers called his “blue period.”
The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.
In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)
And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.
What happened to me? You know what I want to know: What on earth has happened to you?
I have exactly the same principles and support most of the same policies I did under Barack Obama. In fact, I’ve moved left on economic and foreign policy since then. It’s Democrats who have taken a sudden, giant swerve away from their recent past.
At the moment, I’m recording an audiobook for a new collection of my writing, from 1989 - 2021, “Out On A Limb,” to be published next month. (More to come on that next week.) It covers the Obama years, including my impression in May 2007 that he’d be the next president and why I found him so appealing a figure. It’s been a shocking reminder of how our politics has been transformed since then:
My favorite moment was a very simple one. He referred to the anniversary of the March on Selma, how he went and how he came back and someone (I don’t remember who now) said to him: “That was a great celebration of African-American history.” To which Obama said he replied: “No, no, no, no, no. That was not a great celebration of African-American history. That was a celebration of American history.”
How much further can you get from the ideology of the 1619 Project — that rejects any notion of white contributions to black freedom? In his Jeremiah Wright speech, the best of his career, this is what Obama said of Wright’s CRT-inspired words, damning America:
They expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above
all that we know is right with America... The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.
This is what I still believe. Do you?
A plank of successor ideology, for example, is that the only and exclusive reason for racial inequality is “white supremacy.” Culture, economics, poverty, criminality, family structure: all are irrelevant, unless seen as mere emanations of white control. Even discussing these complicated factors is racist, according to Ibram X Kendi.
Obama was a straddler, of course, and did not deny that “so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” I don’t deny that either. Who could? But neither did he deny African-American agency or responsibility:
It means taking full responsibility for own lives — by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
To say this today would evoke instant accusations of being a white supremacist and racist. That’s how far the left has moved: Obama as an enabler of white supremacy. You keep asking: what happened to me? I remain an Obamacon, same as I always have been. What, in contrast, has happened to you?
Check out this really insightful interview of Wes Yang by Matt Taibbi. Yang beautifully explains the radical shift in elite opinion. He notes the ascending rhetoric: “So there’s a line in an n+1 essay, where the person is saying, ‘Oh, we are now menaced by whiteness and masculinity.’ Whereas in the past, we would have said, ‘Oh, we’re menaced by racism and sexism.’” He sees what this movement is about: the end of due process, the rejection of even an attempt at objectivity, a belief in active race and sex discrimination (“equity”) to counter the legacy of the past, the purging of ideological diversity, and the replacement of liberal education with left-indoctrination.
Yang sees the attempt to dismantle the entire carapace of liberal society and liberal institutions: “[The proponents of the successor ideology are] not trying to be malicious, but they are trying to basically annihilate a lot of the foundational processes that we depend upon and then remake them anew. You operate from the starting point that all the previous ideologies, methods, and processes are untrustworthy, because they produced this outcome previously, so we’ve got to remake all of them.” Precisely. This is a revolution against liberalism commanded from above.
Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone.
Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Non-violence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Color-blindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.
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It is absolutely no accident that this illiberal ideology has no qualms whatever with illiberal methods. The latter springs intrinsically from the former. Kendi, feted across the establishment, favors amending the Constitution to appoint an unelected and unaccountable committee of “experts” that has the power to coerce and punish any individual or group anywhere in the country deemed practicing racism. Intent does not matter. And the decisions are final. An advocate for unaccountable, totalitarian control of our society is the darling of every single elite institution in America, and is routinely given platforms where no tough questioning of him is allowed. He is as dumb as Obama is smart; as crude as Obama is nuanced; as authoritarian as Obama is liberal.
Or check out Kevin Drum’s analysis of asymmetric polarization these past few decades. He shows relentlessly that over the past few decades, it’s Democrats who have veered most decisively to the extremes on policy on cultural issues since the 1990s. Not Republicans. Democrats.
On immigration, Republicans have moved around five points to the right; the Democrats 35 points to the left. On abortion, Republicans who advocate a total ban have increased their numbers a couple of points since 1994; Democrats who favor legality in every instance has risen 20 points. On guns, the GOP has moved ten points right; Dems 20 points left.
It is also no accident that, as Drum notes and as David Shor has shown: “white academic theories of racism — and probably the whole woke movement in general —have turned off many moderate Black and Hispanic voters.” This is why even a huge economic boom may not be enough to keep the Democrats in power next year.
We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown. It nearly lost the Democrats the last election. Only Biden’s seeming moderation, the wisdom of black Democratic primary voters,and the profound ugliness of Trump wrested the presidency from a vicious demagogue, whose contempt for our system of government appears ever greater the more we find out about his term in office.
But as Wes Yang notes, Biden has also aided and abetted and justified this radicalism. He has instituted a huge program of overt government race and sex discrimination throughout every policy and area of government; he backs decimating due process for sexual accusations on campus; he favors abolishing religious freedom as a defense of anti-gay discrimination; he believes that gender identity should replace sex as a legal category, and gender identity should rest entirely on self-disclosure; he favors expediting and maximizing mass immigration, not stemming it. In Yang’s rather brutal assessment, for the hard left, “what they saw is that with Joe Biden, who’s this throwback figure, the activists could all rush to him and get most of what they wanted from him anyway.”
Does that mean we should support an increasingly nihilist cult on the right among the GOP? Of course not. Does it mean we should ignore its increasingly menacing contempt for electoral integrity and a stable democracy? Absolutely not. But one reason to fight for liberalism against the successor ideology is that its extremes are quite obviously fomenting and facilitating and inspiring ever-rising fanaticism in response. I fear the successor ideology’s Kulturkampf is already making the 2022 midterms a landslide for a cultish, unmoored GOP. In fighting S.I., we are also fighting Trump.
But I am not making a tactical argument here. I’m making a deeper moral argument. We can and must still fight and argue for what we believe in: a liberal democracy in a liberal society. This fight will not end if we just ignore it or allow ourselves to be intimidated by it, or join the tribal pile-ons. And I will not apologize for confronting this, however unpopular it might make me, just as I won’t apologize for confronting the poison and nihilism on the right. And if you really want to be on “the right side of liberalism,” you will join me.
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(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my review of the HBO miniseries “Mare of Easttown”; my conversation with “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua on the resilience of immigrants and the fragility of college students; yet more reader dissents over my writing on CRT; a few notable quotes from the week; a few notable views from reader windows; eight notable pieces from other substackers; your weekly dose of Mental Health Break; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
wwkirk
Divine
California backtracks on woke math curriculum overhaul after stern opposition
Here's the Open Letter Referenced in the above article:
Replace the Proposed New California Math Curriculum Framework
Here's the Open Letter Referenced in the above article:
Replace the Proposed New California Math Curriculum Framework
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AD1184
Celestial
This is a useful point. On both sides of the Atlantic, left wing media outlets self-servingly try to frame the issue backwards. e.g. "Right wing hysteria over CRT teaching in schools", or, especially in this country, "the right's culture war", despite these things being extreme left wing initiatives, with opponents merely reacting to what is being foisted upon them, and being lumped collectively into "the right" as a result. This is, to borrow a new term popular among leftists, gaslighting.
pigfarmer
tall, thin, irritable
We're all older here on AE and I highly doubt anybody is out flaunting their beach body. We're not talking about just being overweight here. These are younger people who want to glorify morbid obesity and be accepted for who they are. Even granting every exception for real people with real bodies this is absolutely ******* nuts.
Heard this a lot from my buddy and others, and I'm cleaning up the mess a 500 pounder left right now. What they are not showing you is how the person in the airline seat next to you feels having your blubber on them for several hours. Maybe I could just prop my legs up on your lap? They're not showing you the 2' long shoe horns and the reachy-grabby tools required because they've grown too large to put on shoes or pick something up off the floor. Let's not even talk about what the bathroom turns into - you don't believe me I'll post pictures. I do accept them for who they are: unreserved gluttons without the slightest shred of self control. I don't want to shame or hurt anyone's feelings but Christ on a crutch this is absolutely the wrong way to go with this.
My friend glorified this with his son and they thought gorging themselves at all you can eat places was fun. He now has to be moved with something that looks like an engine hoist. The son now posts 'send a food truck' and pics of himself gorging on huge meals. He can't drive anymore or use the stairs and he's maybe 30.
Plus-size travelers speak out about flying while fat – The News Pig
Plus-size travelers speak out about flying while fat
Heard this a lot from my buddy and others, and I'm cleaning up the mess a 500 pounder left right now. What they are not showing you is how the person in the airline seat next to you feels having your blubber on them for several hours. Maybe I could just prop my legs up on your lap? They're not showing you the 2' long shoe horns and the reachy-grabby tools required because they've grown too large to put on shoes or pick something up off the floor. Let's not even talk about what the bathroom turns into - you don't believe me I'll post pictures. I do accept them for who they are: unreserved gluttons without the slightest shred of self control. I don't want to shame or hurt anyone's feelings but Christ on a crutch this is absolutely the wrong way to go with this.
My friend glorified this with his son and they thought gorging themselves at all you can eat places was fun. He now has to be moved with something that looks like an engine hoist. The son now posts 'send a food truck' and pics of himself gorging on huge meals. He can't drive anymore or use the stairs and he's maybe 30.
Plus-size travelers speak out about flying while fat – The News Pig
Plus-size travelers speak out about flying while fat
JahaRa
Noble
We're all older here on AE and I highly doubt anybody is out flaunting their beach body. We're not talking about just being overweight here. These are younger people who want to glorify morbid obesity and be accepted for who they are. Even granting every exception for real people with real bodies this is absolutely ******* nuts.
Heard this a lot from my buddy and others, and I'm cleaning up the mess a 500 pounder left right now. What they are not showing you is how the person in the airline seat next to you feels having your blubber on them for several hours. Maybe I could just prop my legs up on your lap? They're not showing you the 2' long shoe horns and the reachy-grabby tools required because they've grown too large to put on shoes or pick something up off the floor. Let's not even talk about what the bathroom turns into - you don't believe me I'll post pictures. I do accept them for who they are: unreserved gluttons without the slightest shred of self control. I don't want to shame or hurt anyone's feelings but Christ on a crutch this is absolutely the wrong way to go with this.
My friend glorified this with his son and they thought gorging themselves at all you can eat places was fun. He now has to be moved with something that looks like an engine hoist. The son now posts 'send a food truck' and pics of himself gorging on huge meals. He can't drive anymore or use the stairs and he's maybe 30.
Plus-size travelers speak out about flying while fat – The News Pig
Plus-size travelers speak out about flying while fat
I have two dear friends who were quite large. When they flew the airlines made them buy two seats each. They did not find that unreasonable because they could not fit in one seat. They are both over 60 and have worked hard to loose a lot of weight. They would tell these young people to get off their butts and move so that they don't become like your friend's son. The husband has a joke "I have made a lot of money over the years and as you can see we have eaten most of it."
I also have a cousin whose son is way over 300 pounds (he is 6'2" but still). He wanted to be an EMT but he can't follow through on anything and one requirement was that he had to loose weight. He is more active than a lot of people his size but it is not enough to counter the amount of snacks he eats. He is about 30 and for now he is one of those strong big fat guys but I worry about when he hits 40 and isn't as strong.
pigfarmer
tall, thin, irritable
I overcame childhood obesity and lost 130 pounds and tend to be a little preachy on this topic. You get into the need for triple digit weight loss there's a problem not something to be celebrated.
They sound like decent people. The exception not the rule though.
They sound like decent people. The exception not the rule though.
dr wu
Noble
An established Liberal Speaks out Against SJW-PC Madness
What Happened To You?
The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism
Andrew Sullivan“What happened to you?”
'But I am not making a tactical argument here. I’m making a deeper moral argument. We can and must still fight and argue for what we believe in: a liberal democracy in a liberal society. This fight will not end if we just ignore it or allow ourselves to be intimidated by it, or join the tribal pile-ons. And I will not apologize for confronting this, however unpopular it might make me, just as I won’t apologize for confronting the poison and nihilism on the right. And if you really want to be on “the right side of liberalism,” you will join me.'
Great piece.....if only true liberals and conservatives would think long and hard on what he said.....we might get back to normalcy.