America went mad, not because we were poor and oppressed, but because we were rich and bored. By Victor Davis Hanson.
Travel abroad and or talk to pro-American foreigners here, and you will be surprised at what they say. …
They express disbelief, worry, lamentation even, that the one solid referent in the world has gone, well, completely rabid. …
They seem staggered by the very ideas that now emanate from the United States: that nonexistent borders are desirable; that once rarified institutions like the FBI or CIA now function like the Stasi of old; that the very idea of meritocracy is considered racist; that one incorrect word can destroy a life-long career; that there are three or more sexes, not two; that biological men with male genitalia and physiology can compete, and destroy decades of advances, in women’s sports; that race is the sole mode of self-identification; and that half of America dislikes American customs, history — and the other 50 percent of the population — as much as do its enemies.
Onlookers no longer see American universities as free-wheeling bastions of unfettered research and expression. Rather they watch dreary (and sometimes scary) places where conformity to the old Soviet-style is enforced — or else. …
Dogma and Stalinist-like orthodoxy now plague our films, our fiction, our research, and even our scientific inquiry. Public policy discussion of real problems like long COVID can be as much about what race is affected the worst by it — and thus which diabolical actor or demographic is to blame — rather than a Marshall Plan rush to find a cure for everyone.
A discussion of Homer’s Odyssey in college is likely to be a Sovietized melodrama of rooting out the sexists and racists in the preliterate bard’s cosmos, rather than why and how such an epic has enthralled audiences for over 2,700 years. The subtext is that we are growing poorer, weaker, and more ridiculous — an acceptable price if we can at least prove we are woke.
So, what made America unhinged? …
The woke plague:
Properly understood, wokeness is simply the doctrine that all perceived inequality must be the result of culpability, not personal behavior or conduct. There is no role for chance, individual health, inheritance, or character that make us different. …
The duty of government and righteous egalitarian culture is to divide the country, in post-Marxist style, to identify the victims/oppressed, and to redistribute power, money, and influence to them. That allows the anointed to condemn the victimizers/oppressors collectively and to stigmatize, ostracize, and enfeeble them.
Every agency available — government, popular culture, science, history, literature, the arts, the university, the media, big tech, the corporate boardroom, and Wall Street — must be subordinated and recalibrated to spot supposed inequality so that they can fix it through reparatory discrimination. All being equal and poorer is preferable to all being richer, but with some richer than others.
Sometimes the effort manifests in reparatory commercials where 40 to 50 percent of the actors are black. … Sometimes the effort is media-based and designed to ignore self-confessed racial motives in violent crime when the black perpetrators deliberately target white or Asian victims. And sometimes, there is a general exclusionary rule that media grandees can openly generalize and stereotype all whites as toxic — in language that would earn their firings if applied to any other groups. …
Wokeness is also, at its most basic, a selfish creed. We still gladly use the very institutions and infrastructure we inherited from our ancestors—from Stanford University to the Hoover Dam—and then damn them as inferior to our standards. Left unsaid is that our generation can neither create a new major research university nor build a monumental dam. …
Death to individualists, capitalist-roaders, etc etc.
Woke must destroy its critics. And who are they? The age-old individualist. The traditional outspoken. The familiar maverick. The unbeliever. The apostate. Anyone who believes woke is really a familiar and ancient evil with a mere 21st-century face, our version of the Inquisition but supposedly redirected to noble justice, cruel Jacobinism now masked in enlightened racial clothes, or toxic Bolshevism with an iPhone.
Can you have wokeism without Twitter and Facebook, a cancel culture, censors, and an array of punishments?
France never recovered its preeminence
No more than you could have the witch trials without Reverend Samuel Parris’ mass hysteria, or the Reign of Terror without Robespierre and the guillotine of his “Committee of the Public Safety,” or the purges without Stalin and Beria, or the loyalty oaths without Joe McCarthy. …
What will end the woke plague?
What will end wokeness? The reversal of the leisure and affluence that were the bounties of 233 years of what birthed it — free-market capitalism, constitutional government, meritocracy, human rights, tolerance, and free expression.
We are already destroying meritocracy. We are reverting to tribal racial branding. We are strangling energy and food production because of green superstition. We are unleashing the criminal upon the weak and innocent. …
Wokeism is, for now, an affordable irrelevancy that rests on the wealth and lessons produced by those long dead and now much rebuked. But it won’t remain affordable.
Instead, we will learn what woke itself produces — barbarism, chaos, poverty, and civilization in reverse.
Woke is the religion for mediocre and the anti-white, who rely on the collective for everything and hate, hate, hate merit. It kills them that whites invented the modern world, and freed the world from slavery.
hat-tip Charles
