RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/10/20/have-we-reached-the-high-water-mark-of-woke/

Over the past decade, the woke agenda has crested like a giant tsunami, covering virtually the entirety of academia, the media, the corporate world and even the military. The Gramscian concept of ‘the long march through the institutions’, embraced by 1960s radicals like Germany’s Rudi Dutschke, has achieved overwhelming success.

Yet there are signs that the woke progressive model may be losing its appeal, even among some liberals. The bulk of public opinion is not in progressives’ favour. In the US, activist progressives, notes a recent study, represent eight per cent of the electorate – barely half the size of moderates and barely a third of the size of conservatives. What they lack in numbers, however, they make up for with single-minded determination; progressive whites, notes the Atlantic, are the most intolerant of all Americans, led by those in the Boston area, while people in smaller towns and cities seem far more open.

The scalps of those targeted by the woke are strewn across the landscape. There’s the cancellations of ideologically unacceptable speakers, the delisting of books and the increasingly selective media coverage, evident particularly in the 2020 election and its aftermath. Yet the very vehemence of progressives, their lack of humour or grace, may prove to be their undoing.

Among Republicans, wokeness drives them further away from the mainstream media, as many of them now regard certain outlets as little more than vehicles for proselytising progressivism. But it’s not just the nutjobs of the far right. A recent Rasmussen survey found that 58 per cent of likely voters ‘at least somewhat agree that the media are the enemy of the people, including 34 per cent who strongly agree’.

‘Cancel culture’ is no more popular than the rest of the woke agenda. More millennials oppose than support cancel culture, notes a recent Morning Consult poll. The older generations are much more firmly against it. But most heartening is that those in the younger generation, the so-called Zs, are the most hostile to cancel culture, with 55 per cent disapproving of it and only eight per cent supporting it.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/bari-weiss/resist-woke-revolution/

A lot of people want to convince you that you need a Ph.D. or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts about critical theory to understand the woke movement and its worldview. You do not. You simply need to believe your own eyes and ears. 

Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools.  And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.

In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully. 

In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. Just ask Tiffany Riley, a Vermont school principal who was fired—fired—because she said she supports black lives but not the organization Black Lives Matter.

In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. It is why statues of Grant and Washington are being torn down. And it is why William Peris, a UCLA lecturer and an Air Force veteran, was investigated for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out loud in class.

In this ideology, intentions don’t matter. That is why Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic utility worker at San Diego Gas and Electric, was fired for making what someone said he thought was a white-supremacist hand gesture—when in fact he was cracking his knuckles out of his car window.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/joe-biden-nowhere-man/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Unless Biden can reconcile his party’s competing priorities, his presidency will continue to unravel.

J oe Biden’s beleaguered presidency has fueled criticism of the man himself — his history of policy missteps, mental incapacity, and inept administrative style, as well as his family struggles. Whatever his personal flaws, though, the real cause of Biden’s incoherent and even contradictory policies lies not in his incompetence but in the contradictory nature of his agenda and his party.

Biden, despite decades in politics, remains something of a nowhere man, with no demonstrated, consistent worldview beyond expediency. He was elected because corporate power brokers saw him as the only viable alternative first to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and then to the widely detested Donald Trump. These forces, joined by some labor unions and the older black establishment, pushed him over the top in a bizarre, heavily scripted campaign funded largely by the ultra-rich. The pandemic proved ideal for muzzling Biden’s gaffe machine.

In this tumultuous period, the Democratic Party could use a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama, a leader who defines a coherent agenda and inspires voters. Some still believe that Biden’s reputation for compromise and bipartisanship is working, but his poll numbers suggest otherwise. The president’s approval rating, which was dropping before the Afghanistan debacle, is now heading toward the lows plumbed by his predecessor. Unless Biden somehow succeeds in elaborating a clear agenda, his presidency likely will continue to unravel.

Democratic Divisions and Contradictions

Like Caesar’s Gaul, the Democratic Party contains three distinct and often competing factions. The first consists of increasingly “woke” tech oligarchs and their Wall Street funders. They financed “a shadow campaign” for Biden, pouring millions into get-out-the-vote efforts and running media interference (most obviously in the Hunter Biden scandal) for his campaign.

Once elected, Biden duly inserted representatives of this class at the top of his administration. His cabinet is made up overwhelmingly of pedigreed, coastal metropolites (a third of the new cabinet went to Harvard). As the leftist Nation put it in a convincing story, under Biden the Democrats have become, without question, “the party of the rich.”

https://www.nysun.com/national/democrats-are-back-on-the-heels-as-bidens-polling/91669/

With President Biden’s polls once again plunging and wide gaps in the Democratic Party over spending and taxing along with some serious grassroots opposition from groups like the save America coalition, I really do believe the Democrats are on the run. They’re back on their heels. They can’t get their story straight.

Again this evening I express my support for Senator Joe Manchin’s “strategic pause” to carry over big budget deals until the spring of 2022. Our motives might be a bit different, but our goals right now are similar. If the Democratic budget resolution doesn’t get through reconciliation until then — which admittingly is an improbable longshot — then the whole thing will die.

I do believe public Democratic weakness after the Biden meetings and the nonsensical press conference with Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi have a lot to do with the huge stock market rally today.

While insiders tell me that President Biden told democratic leaders to come up with their own topline on spending and, I presume taxes, at this point that project looks impossible with Mr. Manchin at between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion, the Bernie Sanders budget scored at $3.5 trillion, and the actual gimmick-free budget scored at about $5.5 trillion.

That’s some spread.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/15/the_deep_politics_of_vaccine_mandates_146408.html

The debate over President Biden’s vaccine mandates has focused, understandably, on the tradeoff between individual rights to make medical choices and the potential harm the unvaccinated pose to others. That tradeoff is unavoidable. It is simply wrong for Biden to say, “It’s not about freedom.” It is. It is equally wrong for some Republican governors to say it is all about freedom. It’s also about the external effects of each person’s choice. To pretend that tradeoff doesn’t exist is demagoguery. But then, so is most American politics these days.

What’s missing or underappreciated in this debate?

The most important thing is that the Biden administration’s “mandate approach” is standard-issue progressivism. The pushback is equally standard. The mandates exemplify a dispute that has been at the heart of American politics for over a century, ever since Woodrow Wilson formulated it as a professor and then president. That agenda emphasizes deference to

Experts, not elected politicians,
Rational bureaucratic procedures,
Centralized power in the nation’s capital, not in the federal states, and
A modern, “living constitution,” which replaces the “old” Constitution of 1787 and severs the restraints it imposed on government power.

Implemented over several decades, this progressive agenda has gradually become a fait accompli, without ever formally amending the Constitution. The bureaucracies began their massive growth after World War II and especially after Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the mid-1960s (continued, with equal vigor, by Richard Nixon).

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/16/afghan-tragedy-border-blunders-vaccine-disaster-now-biden-co-want-to-spend-us-into-socialist-oblivion/

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin had it partly right when he called for a “strategic pause”. But now it is clear that the $3.5 trillion price tag seriously understates the Bernie Sanders/AOC/progressive reconciliation bill through which they will try to remake America into their socialist image.

Early on, Sens. Rick Scott, R-Florida, and Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., both recognized that the price tag was artificially low for all these socialist goodies revealed in the initial budget resolution. And that’s just the start. They and many others are pegging the actual price tag at $5 or even $7 trillion. The reason for the discrepancy is found in the entitlements, the actual details of which are still embargoed in the massive 10,000-page bill.

What we do know comes from the budget resolution that outlines the Bernie Sanders/AOC “leftist wish list” and seeks a complete remaking of the American economy. It is key to remember that congressional budgets are blueprints for the actual spending – advanced ultimately in this case in a reconciliation bill – which will take place later this month.

Reconciliation was originally adopted as a provision of law to cut overall government spending to fit into the federal budget. But today it is a chance for another bite at the apple for tax increases and for new entitlement spending that cannot be cut since entitlement spending is automatic as provided by law. Today reconciliation serves another purpose: adoption of new regulatory policies that effectively operate as taxes by imposing new costs on businesses.