This segment indirectly raises the important point that some opponents of PC/wokeness/cancel culture, from both the right and sectors of the left, always make exceptions for their favorite issues or causes, whether it’s supporting Israel or opposing burning the flag.
From the text of the 1976 Constitution of Enver Hoxha’s Albania. Sound familiar?
Article 53
Citizens enjoy the freedom of speech, the press, organization, association, assembly and public manifestation.
The state guarantees the realization of these freedoms, it creates the conditions for them, and makes available the necessary material means.
Article 54
The right to join various organizations which operate in the political, economic, cultural as well as in any other field of the country’s life, is guaranteed to the citizens.
Article 55
The creation of any type of organization of a fascist, anti-democratic, religious, and anti-socialist character is prohibited.
Fascist, anti-democratic, religious, war-mongering, and anti-socialist activities and propaganda, as well as the incitement of national and racial hatred are prohibited.
By Jesse Singal
Reason
I’m not usually a fan of the saying “a hit dog will holler,” which basically boils down to “if someone responds angrily to an accusation, they are probably guilty.” Sometimes, when someone is unfairly attacked or wrongly accused, they respond to it with vitriol or other intense emotion—it’s only natural.
That said, sometimes the expression is useful. If you accuse someone of having an anger-management problem and they fly into a terrifying rage, well: A hit dog will holler.
This is a pretty good discussion of this issue from Kyle. I agree with much of what he says, although I wish he would have given more recognition to the centuries-long history of censorship and state repression by leftist regimes. Usually, the response I get from leftists when I raise that issue is the same one I get from neo-Nazis about the Holocaust and Catholic traditionalists about the Inquisition: “It didn’t happen but it was justified but it wasn’t that bad but everyone else was doing it…”
The part about “anti-racist racism” (around 3:45) is interesting.
A WWE matchup. I suppose it has never occurred to any of these guys that systemic racism can exist within the context of a totalitarian humanist regime, just as class oppression can exist in a Communist regime, or that ethnic Germans were oppressed by the Third Reich.
A quasi-SJW makes his case. The main problem that I have with his arguments is that he seems to imply that all non-leftist thought is by definition illegitimate and/or the equivalent of fascism. Although I agree with his point that right-wingers are often only in favor of free speech when out of power, kind of like leftists, ironically. The Left always becomes the Right once in power. It’s not a coincidence that the more powerful the Left has become, the less concerned the Left has been about free speech issues. This becomes obvious when you compare the US Left of today with that of the 1960s and 1970s.
As crazy as Noam has gotten in his old age, he still stands up to the new clerisy. Kudos.
By Peter Van Burn
The American Conservative
I’m ambivalent about statues and J.K. Rowling being torn down, but terrified of the thought process behind the destruction. Decisions should never be made by mobs. Is America on the edge of a cultural revolution?
The historical namesake and obvious parallel is the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted from 1966 to 1976. Its stated goal was to purge capitalist and traditional elements from society, and to substitute a new way of thinking based on Mao’s own beliefs. The epic struggle for control and power waged war against anybody on the wrong side of an idea.
This discussion nails it. Robin D’Angelo gets paid $12,000 per session to give a two-hour lecture to corporate employees on “anti-racism” so that corporations so pose as do-gooders while continuing to grind down the working class.
James Lindsay is arguably the best critic of the modern totalitarian left there is. This lays it all out pretty well.
Wow. Someone actually recognizes this. Democrats and Republicans are the left and right wings of the Neo-Feudalism Party.
Well, at least we know which firms to attack during the next wave of uprisings (if we didn’t already). And intra-ruling class conflict is always welcome. It’s also interesting how “hate” has become the new “obscenity.” It shows that the ruling class can always use whatever mores are dominant in the wider society to their advantage.
This is important stuff.
I recently put a couple of questions concerning current events to a well-known intellectual historian, a Jewish man whose parents fled Hungary during the rise of Hitler, and who is a specialist in the history of 20th-century totalitarian movements. His responses confirmed my suspicion that both the bizarre de facto alliance of the far-left, liberals, neocons, and Bush Republicans which has emerged in opposition to the Trumpists, and the seeming acquiescence of the state to both the iconoclasm spree of the far left and the lumpenproletarian insurrection, represents efforts by the capitalist class, the new clerisy, and the Deep State to weaponize both the far left and the insurrectionists against the Trumpists, subsequently purging or co-opting both, while restoring neocon dominance of the military-industrial-intelligence complex. In other words, it’s all about putting the neocons back in charge of US foreign policy. Remember that the neocons started out as Trots, and this is exactly how Bolshies do things.
Ironically, Virginia has a Democratic government that recently passed a bunch of “woke” legislation but is ranked 51st in the country, below the other 49 states and Washington, D.C, on the issue of workers’ rights. Thanks to the northern Virginia suburbs, Virginia is becoming the California of the East Coast.
Gov. Ralph Northam on Monday quietly signed an executive order extending a state of emergency declaration in Richmond, citing “civil unrest” following weeks of protests that have resulted in violent clashes between demonstrators and police.
The extension came at the request of Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, who said in a Monday letter to the governor that the city has “minimum funding to cover costs” tied to the response, and that “the bandwidth of our personnel will reach its limit.”
A somewhat interesting interview with a leading black conservative.
I would be inclined to argue that, at present, substantial sectors of the capitalist class (including some major capitalist entities) along with their allies in the new clerisy/new class that dominates the “ideas industries” are fueling anti-racism hysteria in order to deflect attention away from the class-based nature of the insurrection. They do this because a race war is less antithetical to their interests than a class war. However, contra the Marxists and left-anarchists, it doesn’t stop at class either. Even a class war is more co-optable than a direct war against the state itself.
All of this follows an easily identifiable pattern in US history.
But isn’t “chicks” considered by many feminists to be a derogatory term for women? I remember when these ladies were being lambasted by the right-wing for being unpatriotic for criticizing the Iraq War.
In its more benign forms, this stuff is simply the Legion of Decency, Moral Majority, social purity, or temperance movements, according to the norms of 2020. Only instead of crusading against vice and alcohol everyone is crusading against offensiveness and insensitivity. In a few decades or generations, there will probably be crusades against the depiction of meat-eating in movies. In its more malevolent forms, its a revisitation of the theocratic and secular totalitarian revolutions of the past (Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, etc.). Human beings just seem to have some kind of psychological need for purification rituals and rites.
JM Stephens
MSN Entertainment
Mississippi has the worst poverty rate in the US and an infant mortality rate that matches China’s or Sri Lanka’s, particularly among blacks. Princess Faith doesn’t seem much worried about that (and probably doesn’t know about it). While the lumpenproletariat engages in actual class war and armed struggle against the state, aristocrats and the new clerisy engage in virtue signaling and fuel moral panic.
By Joe Erwin
New York Daily News
Country music icon Faith Hill had a hit with “Mississippi Girl,” but she’s got a big problem with her home state.
It flies on flagpoles throughout the Magnolia State. The country superstar took to Twitter in a series of tweets asking Mississippi to change its state flag, which has a portion of the Confederate battle flag in its top left corner.
Universities need to purge their libraries of Marxist literature, lol.
By Walter Williams
LewRockell.Com
For those who see Marx as their hero, there are a few historical tidbits they might find interesting. Nathaniel Weyl, himself a former communist, dug them up for his 1979 book, “Karl Marx: Racist.” For example, Marx didn’t think much of Mexicans. When the United States annexed California after the Mexican War, Marx sarcastically asked, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” Engels shared Marx’s contempt for Mexicans, explaining: “In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.”
This kind of like when Lenin referred to middle-class liberals as useful idiots for the revolution. If these do-gooder types can be guilt-shamed into anti-piggishness, fine. Whatever works.
New York Times
MINNEAPOLIS — When Shari Albers moved three decades ago into Powderhorn Park, a tree-lined Minneapolis neighborhood known as a haven to leftist activists and bohemian artists like herself, she went to work sprucing it up.
She became a block club leader, organizing her mostly white neighbors to bring in playgrounds and help tackle longstanding issues with crime.
On many nights, she banged on the car windows of men who had come to solicit prostitutes outside her door, she said. She kept meticulous notes when dozens of men would gather in a circle for gang meetings in the park across from her house. After each episode, she called the police.
Indeed it is. What the totalitarian Left typically tries to do is ride the wave of popular rebellion to state power. But when they start attacking the religion is often when they start losing popular sympathy, and public opinion will then take a rightward turn. It happened in Hungary in 1919, in Spain in 1936, in Iran in 1979, and plenty of other places. This is how you get the Falangists and the Revolutionary Guards.
Atheist-leftist Kyle Kulinski defends the right of Christians to have a white Jesus image on private property.
