RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/chinas-useful-idiots/

A nation that is obsessed with apologizing for itself is ill-prepared to confront external threats.

The anti–“zero Covid” protesters in China may be finished with the CCP, but the CCP isn’t finished with them. After making a public show of easing some Covid restrictions, Xi Jinping and his army of Stasi-like thugs set about making an example of those involved in the regime’s monthslong embarrassment. The show of force against the protest movement was typical of dictatorships that rely, at least in part, on fear as a mechanism for maintaining power. But the efforts to delegitimize the anti-regime demonstrations had an ideological component as well. A New York Times piece on the crackdown today reported:

The party is also working to discredit the protesters by casting them as tools of malevolent foreign powers. Beijing has long dismissed dissent at home — from calls for women’s rights to pro-democracy activism to ethnic unrest — as the result of Western-backed subversion. The protests against “zero Covid” were no exception: One Chinese diplomat suggested that some of the demonstrators had been “bought by external forces.”

Describing the detention of four Chinese women who were alleged to have been involved in anti-regime activities, the Times reported: “The police have asked the women about their use of overseas messaging platforms or involvement in feminist activities, such as reading groups. . . . Chinese propaganda has decried feminism as another tool of foreign influence.” As a descriptive matter, feminist movements in China probably do draw inspiration from Western ideology. Yet the irony in Beijing’s narrative is that Chairman Xi still has plenty of enablers in the West — particularly among the left-wing cultural movements tied to the kind of activism his regime decries.

This is not to say that the progressive forces that have emerged from academia in recent years — fourth-wave feminism, critical race and gender theory, and so on — are pro-CCP. When pressed, most of their advocates would likely mouth bromides about the Chinese regime’s human-rights violations and its oppression of women. The Left, for the most part, is not motivated by an admiration for China, as segments of it were toward the Soviet Union. What today’s progressives are motivated by is a distaste for the idea of America having a set of “national interests,” let alone any serious efforts to defend them.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/01/27/another-wave-of-joe-biden-j-o-b-s-losses-n1665451

Let me tell you about a little something important, Fat. It happens to be the “number one job facing the middle class and it happens to be a three-letter word: Jobs!  J–O–B–S!  Jobs!” So declared then-Vice President Joe Biden on behalf of his boss, Barack Obama, back in 2008, the last time the economy was shredded.

Here we are all these years later and Joe Biden, millions of dollars richer, is presiding over another disastrous economy made worse by his government overspending. He must think we all have sons funneling us cash from money laundering operations with Ukraine and China or something.

But no Negative Nellies are allowed here. The president says the economy’s just great, and how dare you say anything any different, Jack, unless you want to do a pushup contest right here and now to settle it.

This week, the Big Guy was broken out of the White House and rushed off to a curated collection of union members to tout what a great economy he has built back better. He put his foot down and whispered; he growled about how he had “no intention of letting the Republicans wreck the economy” that he and the Democrats have done such a top-notch job of destroying.

But sadly for his Happy Days Are Here Again narrative, these past few days brought another round of Big Tech and media sector layoffs. This is beginning to be a weekly occurrence as Silicon Valley’s ones and zeros are marched past the La Cimbali latte machine and the chef’s menu board, down the slide, and into the unemployment lines.

Will anyone tell Joe?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/26/the-caesars-of-the-information-age/

I thought I would feel some relief when the social-media giants came to their senses and let Donald Trump back on their platforms. Yet now that it’s happened, now that Meta has decreed that Trump has served his time in the virtual wilderness and may once again post on Facebook and Instagram, I just feel unnerved. Unnerved by the extraordinary power these people wield over who may and who may not engage with the billions of souls who gather online. Unnerved by their supranational authority to grant or rescind a licence to speak in the global town square. Unnerved by the historically unprecedented dominion this small clique of the woke rich enjoys over the liberty to utter.

The unbanning of Trump feels less like a victory for freedom of speech than a triumph of Silicon Valley Caesarism. It sends the message that it is for these Emperors of the Information Age to decide who may enter the modern arena of discussion, who may have to be expelled, how long they should be expelled for, and under what conditions they may be permitted to return once their punishment is complete.

Indeed, even though Meta’s statement on readmitting Trump to Facebook and Instagram is justified in the language of freedom of speech – ‘The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying’, it says, with staggering gall, given it spent the past two years preventing the public from hearing what Trump was saying – it also says it will keep a tight leash on Trump. If he violates any of Meta’s protocols, he’ll be suspended again, they warn, for anywhere between one month and two years. So the politician may speak to the people, so long as he says nothing to offend the arrogant hip capitalists who control 21st-century public discussion. Their message is crystal clear: ‘We’re still in control, and we always will be.’

Trump was banished from social media in January 2021. Following the Capitol Hill riot of 6 January, virtually all of Silicon Valley decreed that he should be unpersoned, blacklisted, silenced. He was kicked off Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Spotify and Twitch. YouTube, Reddit and TikTok brought in stiff restrictions on the expression of pro-Trump sentiment. Google and Apple removed the Parler app from their stores, so that the virtual masses wouldn’t be able to access the one platform that was still allowing Trump to speak.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/the-woke-revolution-is-far-from-over/

Just over a year ago, I wrote a lengthy article detailing all the reasons why no one should assume the far-left “Woke” ideological revolution was over, even if conservatives here in the United States were to ride what seemed a “red wave” of popular political dissatisfaction to a sweeping victory in November’s mid-term elections. Well, those elections are now over, and it turns out there wasn’t even any wave to speak of. It’s worth thinking seriously about what that result signals about where this increasingly global ideological revolution is headed.

We are now more than two years downstream from the fiery Year Zero of the Revolution, 2020, when, amid the most widespread and destructive riots in the nation’s history, nearly every public and private institution in American life (and then beyond, across nearly the whole of the broader Western world) simultaneously pledged allegiance to the same transformational illiberal ideology that had inspired the violence. The results were immediate, shocking in scope, and lasting in consequence: the primacy of racial consciousness and grievance was forcefully reintroduced into society in the name of racial “diversity” and “equity”; police departments were defunded and criminal behavior effectively decriminalized in the name of “social justice,” resulting in a deadly ongoing crime wave; elite medical and educational institutions, along with the American government, began not only to mainstream extremist concepts like the mutilating surgical “affirmation” of children’s alleged transgender identity (among other innovations) in the name of “inclusion,” but to actively seek to criminalize any opposition to these and other practices; in a coordinated effort with the state, the world’s largest technology and media giants imposed a great wave of censorship in an effort to entrench and defend the ideological hegemony of the Revolution and its values; mobbed by zealots, dissenters to the new ideological regime were summarily ousted from their positions and livelihoods; families and friendships were torn apart as the window of acceptable opinion shifted with lightning speed… This is only to scratch the surface of the traumatic upheaval that was thrust onto American society.

But now we know that all of this barely moved the needle in America’s tribal politics. There was either no coherent backlash to the Woke revolution at the ballot box, or its adherents proved just as numerous and motivated as its opponents. Those few tentative suggestions about how progressive policies and messaging might have gone too far, which had begun to sporadically appear as anxiety proliferated on the left ahead of the elections, will now all be swiftly forgotten. With no costs imposed for their behavior, and so no incentive to change course, the revolutionaries’ already self-confident zeal will only redouble.

Which, make no mistake, means that the Woke are now winning decisively. The reason for this is straightforward: of the key institutional high ground – from educational institutions to the media and Hollywood and the publishing houses, to the tech giants (with the recent singular exception of Elon Musk’s Twitter), to the law schools and the legal associations, to the healthcare system and medical schools, to the powerful foundations, big banks, corporate consulting giants, and stock exchanges, to even the churches, not to mention the federal government – essentially all of it is already Woke. This means that a 50-50 stalemate in the arena of democratic politics is no stalemate at all, but the continuation of a totally lopsided war of civilizational attrition.