Please, if you will, read this article and tell us your reaction to it.
“Even if Red Tribe does sweep the elections in November, or 2024, what is likely to be the result? Probably the same as their last period in the majority: at lot of populist huffing, puffing, and flailing about trying not to drown as the Revolution continues to advance.”
Just read this on your other post, and noted that reading it felt like stepping into a pit of quicksand.
As I replied there, Liz - a very good analogy!
Yes, it’s hard to see how all of this can be eradicated from society when we have sunk so deep into it already.
Quote:
The scope of U.S. federal antidiscrimination statutes that grew out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have already made the core facts of what people think of as “Wokeness” the law of the land. This includes the concept that all disparities are due to discrimination (“disparate impact”), the requirement that employers relentlessly police private speech that could be in any way offensive to any “protected class” (to prevent a “hostile work environment”), and “affirmative action” in hiring. Moreover, the law as written is so deliberately vague in its language that any new claims to rights raised by any protected identity group can be seamlessly slipped into the body of harms that any company or organization must legally prevent. So, for example, if any employee refuses for whatever reason to refer to another employee by their chosen gender pronouns, the entire company is in real danger of being held liable for violation of Title IX and Title VII by permitting discrimination on the basis of sex (as affirmed by the Supreme Court in its Bostock decision). Or at least so the company must assume, because the potential financial penalties are far too high to risk it. The nonconforming employee is getting the boot …
The safest path through this regulatory mess is simply to hire a very large HR department staffed with “experts” in all these rules and let them handle it, including by subjecting employees to a vast numbers of “training sessions” run by DEI consultants, all of which can if necessary then be pointed to in court as evidence that the company was definitely doing everything it could to prevent any discrimination from occurring. … The phenomenon of “political correctness” emerged as simply “the cultural effect of the basic enforcement powers of civil rights law”. This means any claim by conservative politicians that they will put an end to Wokeness if elected to office is pure theater.
Comment:
A law does not have to be taken to an absurd extreme. For instance: religions are protected by the First Amendment, but if a religion appeared in America that insisted on ritually killing a youth or maiden as sacrifices to its gods, the First Amendment protection would not apply. The practice would be treated as criminal homicide.
Besides, conservative politicians elected to positions of power can change civil rights laws.
And as to the author’s claim that the “woke” revolution cannot be stopped – okay, not by politicians. But it seem truckers refusing to move could do it.
When the invention of the Gutenberg printing press launched an information revolution in the 15th century, the full consequences took well over a century to play out – a century of theological chaos, bitter division, and bloodshed. The mass media revolution of radio then helped do the same in the 20th century. We should hardly expect the consequences of the internet to be any less dramatic or long lasting.
Far more dramatic I think, but now the real danger is that the powers that be will manage to more effectively suppress the voices of dissent, in which case the internet will become ever more a tool for totalitarianism rather than the tool that facilitates a thought revolution (at the moment I think it could go either way). The important difference is that the internet is not just a sort of digital printing press, it’s also a tool for mass surveillance the like of which has never been seen before.
the “Big Three” asset managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. With a collective $22 trillion in assets under management, and owning an average of 22% of the typical S&P 500 company, these three firms have the power to dictate corporate policy across the world
Correct, I believe this is very significant, and Larry Fink the chairman and CEO is a “Democrat” who thinks democracies are “messy” and so prefers totalitarian government.
The revolution isn’t over but it’s not a grassroots revolution, it’s almost a fake revolution in that it has been largely facilitated by cynical wealthy manipulators. As such I rather suspect that it has been built on shaky foundations and so is vulnerable to “populist” counter-revolutionary attacks from both the “left” and the “right”.
Some people even on the “left” are starting to become very suspicious of everything that we are told, and some of these people have huge followings - Russell Brand is a good example who is hurtling towards the 5 million followers mark on Youtube. He is now being accused of being right-wing which means the woke and the powers that be are starting to move against him:
We’ve also seen the attempt to cancel the biggest podcaster in the world Joe Rogan, who endorsed Bernie Sanders so certainly cannot be described as “right” wing either.
We’ve even seen former heroes/heroines of the left like Germaine Greer and JK Rowling falling foul of the woke mob, so it’s a very divided movement and likely to become further plagued by division from within.
Overall I think everything hangs in the balance and the most important thing right now is that we keep talking and keep the dissent alive.
You write: “The important difference is that the internet is not just a sort of digital printing press, it’s also a tool for mass surveillance the like of which has never been seen before.”
A hugely significant point!
I should have written “mass surveillance and suppression of dissent”, it’s possibly an even more important point that it makes it easy for the powers that be to shape opinion by suppression (not necessarily total bans as well but the shadow banning that we’ve both also experienced, and the manipulation of search engine results).
Another thought about this is that if we can manage to convince enough people that they have been misled re. COVID-19 then the trust not only in the globalist media could collapse, but also people could become more questioning of what they are told by academics and govt.s as well, across the board, including woke ideology. This is why I think we have to get the truth about COVID-19 to as wide an audience as possible.
Oh well…my comment in the other thread:
Did you read many of the comments? I always find that there is more to think about than just the article, which is ponderous to me, and I skimmed a lot.
It will not be our elected leaders that cause Wokeness to go underground. It will be us. Some of regular people’s efforts will affect decision making and that is to the good. But more to an everyday point, wokeness scorned by the aware will continue to knock it down.
Is there an Awakening against the Wokening? I think so.
Chauncey, don’t you think this is already happening? A great lack of trust in formerly trusted entities of government? FBI, CIA, CDC, the Prez, public schools, corporate media?
FB? Twitter? Snopes? The Weather Channel?
You know what folks talk about at bars, restaurants, waiting for the kids at school, grocery stores, pharmacies, on the street and around dinner tables or McDonalds tables? They talk about how sickened they are with all the crapola being forced on the public. And how they are looking for a real return to normal life, and getting Conservatives in office. That would certainly be a step in the right direction and shocking to the Dems.
People are stupid, yes…but in our county all of the Republican elected officials, which is most of them (Commissioners, Sheriff, School Board), have a primary against a Conservative Republican. The 2022 election here will be decided in the primary.
If that sort of thinking holds elsewhere around the country, then it will not just be Republicans that win, but Conservatives. People are fighting mad here, and I bet they are elsewhere, as well.
What do you see in your country?
The government claims that 65% have had a third jab, which is down on the 90% + who had a first, that might be the best indication we have that the fear of COVID-19 is starting to wane, but I’m not sure this is due to increasing distrust of the media or just follows a change in the media narrative. The news media is noticeably starting to wind down the COVID-19 news, although the BBC still has a front page link to its daily COVID-19 update.
I was dismayed by the number of people wearing masks in supermarkets, some still are even now though it’s no longer mandatory, but not so many now. I don’t see much sign of rebelliousness here in short I’m afraid, but then Western Europe on the continent is going in the opposite direction while our govt. have been relaxing the rules, so that’s not entirely surprising.
A grim report from Britain:
Yes, this is what is so disturbing - that these corporations have more power than politicians - and therefore over us - the people who vote the politicians into their offices.
It’s as if we’re coming full circle - back to serfdom under those with the most money.