School choice has been a conservative policy going back to the slave system. Parents who were slaves were not allowed to educate their children the way they saw fit. Any slave or non-slave who attempted to provide an academic education to children born into slavery, an education beyond being indoctrinated in the "naturalness" and "morality" of the slave system, going beyond whatever basic labor skills the master required, would be punished for providing that education. The K-12 agenda on the left is pretty much the same thing today. Forget reading, writing and math as they will instead teach children the rightness of Progressive ideology.
100% - the ideas of Paolo Freire have been thoroughly disseminated through teacher ed. programs. Highly recommend The Marxification of Education by James Lindsay for an in depth analysis of this capture.
Freier's Marxist ideas were a response to the opposite extremism in Brazilian aristocratic circles at the time, the fear of an educated population. That people have brought his ideas into our teacher education programs displays a lack of historical understanding of his experiences. After retiring from the USN, I went through a teacher certification program, and I can attest that you are correct.
Likewise. Thankfully I only had snippets of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in my teacher ed program in 2003, but my friend was assigned the whole thing in 2012 at UCLA :/
I can imagine it’s only gotten worse. Glad I made it out before the full-on indoctrination began.
But Freire was not interested in educating children, but turning them into Marxist true believers and activists, to the complete dereliction of an actual education. The result is almost complete illiteracy and innumeracy in the population.
Some of the staff from my school got a parking ticket downtown yesterday when gathering for the strike. Made me laugh to myself that hey, they are good little revolutionaries in that they can’t read parking signs, but they are politically literate. Freire would be proud. (I justify my snide thoughts bc I was basically voluntold for this strike. No vote, not even my strike.)
Great article! It seems the left has always had the upper hand at utilizing emotions to their advantage...creating hysteria and turning EVERY issue into "emotional soup"...telling everyone how the right only cares about "bottom lines" & making money...and not your feelings & family....
I love (LOL) the way that seemingly intelligent people are so quick to infer that "the left" people are all the same, completely unlike conservative people who get most of their news from one source. Very funny comment. I hate to break it to you, but people on the right are extremely complex individuals, just like the people on the left. BTW - God created them all
Seems you have misinterpreted my comment...that's ok ...it's just your opinion...I also see that you have made several other comments that seem to be out of touch with the entire article....what is it that you are really seeking??
I read part of the article by CFR, and reviewed some of the comments but got snagged by a half dozen of them - frequently related to sweeping generalizations and a tireless attempt to make distinctions between Us and Them - which is the focus of my blog. When ANY person makes statements such as - "... The LEFT HAS ALWAYS. . . " OR , "THE RIGHT ONLY CARES ABOUT . . . I think it's both amusing on the one hand, and discouraging on the other.
As I said, I give ALL people credit for being more complex than that. BTW, to me, sweeping generalizations aren't a left or a right thing - so don't take it personally. I do wish you a nice, almost spring, day.
I agree with you...but..since all of the comments are pertaining to CFR's article they are bound to speak to specific issues within the article....namely the commentors experience. I do not wish to paint with a broad brush....this comment was based on my experience. I agree that as a society it seems we (left&right)have lost the art of true and civil debate , genuine concern for the COMMON good & the ability to engage in true compromise on serious issues.
I wholeheartedly agree with the closing line of your statement above - about society. However, I think we just engaged in a brief "true and civil debate". A willingness to seriously debate, find common ground and then accept some compromise is key to us evolving out of the mess we're in. One of my recent posts is about the ongoing barrage of biased information and selective news - https://markvanlaeys.substack.com/p/indoctrination-a-spectrum-phenomena. I sincerely appreciate "talking" with you. Take care, Mark
The left always weaponizes language to make bad things sound good. We must counter with a one-two punch: ridiculing jabs and lofty high minded uppercuts for the KO. Here are terms to use: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-coin-a-term
As you're interested in power and language manipulation, I think you might get something out of this recent post in The TransAtlantic. It's about the way that acronyms are useful/used for hiding power and control in plain sight. Very effective in the information age. If you have any comments, I'd be glad to hear them.
I noticed especially Biden’s recent comment on the trans issue when he used the phrase “almost a sin.” It really struck me that he was moving even into religious territory. I think Christopher has a great point! Let’s use moral/values arguments as we battle identity politics.
Moral / value arguments would be welcome - especially if we focus on the teachings of Christ since we are predominantly a Christian Nation. Jesus rarely put down any groups of people except those who considered themselves holier than others.
Sorry disagree. I’m sure there are right wing virtue signalers but the majority voices talking about how righteous they are are left wing. Not sure why you picked my comment to start an argument on, but im not interested in name calling; my comment was to agree with Christopher’s premise. If you don’t agree or don’t like my comment, more power to you! Have a great evening!
“...an ideology based on resentment, revenge, and redistribution...”
Time to start framing “the left” in terms of what they’re really pushing/shoving down our throats, and what the majority of American citizens are completely sick of.
One of the values we need to promote is the dignity of hard work. The newly arrived immigrants, legal or not, have a yearning to work their way up in society. We can win hearts by recognizing and rewarding their success. For the broad population we need to recognize and reward small business success. Republicans should initiate some highly visible programs at local levels and national levels to give awards to the most innovative new businesses, or the most new employees hired.
Very well said , Bob - I agree wholeheartedly. It is so refreshing to read in this thread about something that would lift people up instead of put people down. Both sides have been doing mainly the latter - especially over the last twenty years or so.
Intersectional Identity Politics cannot be gamed. It must be rejected. I'm glad you've arrived at that conclusion. Even on the left they descend into purity spirals. Corey Deangelis and you are both onto something big. Keep on fleshing out these policies and pillars and we'll stand with you all the way to the WH and beyond. Blessings
Great article. Democracy depends on the idea the government has a moral consensus. Not only is the reframing effective to our side, but it also allows far more effective cohesion, removing sperging into various policy details and focusing on getting power.
The next step is to develop an effective media apparatus to replace the ossified platforms we currently have. There are way too many lynchpins to erase our moral framing from public discussion, as the cancelling of Alex Jones shows.
The left definitely snookers Republicans by manipulating language. Case in point: Social Emotional Learning. Thank you for addressing this!
I have the utmost respect and appreciation for your work and I rarely disagree with you. But, as one of the activist "white suburban moms" criticized a few years ago by Arne Duncan, my perspective on school choice is long-range, well-informed, and consequently, somewhat skeptical. The law of unintended consequences is in full bloom. Please hear me out.
I've been watching this closely for too many years, and have seen too many nuances in the implementation & definition, to believe that school choice is the silver bullet your colleague and his employer Betsy DeVos would have us believe. It's NOT just better use of language that is fueling the rush to school choice. For starters, it's more money.
DeVos's foundation also funded and promoted the Common Core movement and scuttled the efforts of Michigan parents who tried to end it in her home state. So DeVos, her foundation, and its lobbyists have not acted in good faith with regard to the impact of her educational agendas on families. They have acted as the adversaries of parents and have not even tried to earn trust. They just rolled over parents in pursuit of their agenda. And as operators of charter schools, they are not exactly objective participants in the school choice discussion. They are throwing money at school choice.
To actually fix the schools, we have to start by removing the Federal control that was codified into federal statute, via ESSA. We have to get rid of the unvalidated and demonstrably low quality "college and career-ready" Common Core 'standards' that have led to the stagnation and then falling NAEP scores. (The pandemic conveniently gets the blame for this, but the real culprit is 10 years of Common Core! Check the numbers, the slide started long before covid!)
And we have to stop the intrusive data-mining of our children and get back to teaching students, not test scores & data points. What good is school choice when EVERY choice is using Common Core-aligned tech platforms and materials (books also went away with CC). It just moves kids to another location to get a lousy common education.
School choice proponents like to cite free market competition, as the key to fixing schools. But this is a false premise, because public schools are NOT remotely 'free.' They are among the most regulated entities in existence! Free market competition is not possible. Nor would that be a good educational model to pursue, for one seeking quality, classical education, and not just the job training that is being pushed as workforce development.
The ill-defined school choice movement has a lot of support from leftist educrats. And a lot of funding from rich and powerful profiteers of every political stripe.
To your point, in the case of school choice, it is not just a better use of language that is helping school choice gain momentum, it is MORE MONEY and more earned media, because of other education issues that school choice profiteers are able to co-opt, and convince people 'choice' will solve. When in actuality, it won't. It's a bandwagon issue.
But a lot of parents who are new to the battle, don't know the long history of education reform, and have not connected the dots to see that school choice is just a way to funnel federal funds - through parents - into private, parochial, and even home schools, to ultimately give the feds TOTAL CONTROL over education. And that would be a win for the Dems.
So - pleeease do not say "color blind" but use the far more powerful "nondiscriminatory"
And the phrase I would like to see replace "woke" is "hateful abasement" or "abasementist". A lot of the woke rhetoric truly does serve to abase White Americans. Never say, "I am not racist." Rather say, "please do not abase my race with a rash accusation."
The vast majority of woke people are white women now. It might not have started out that way but it becomes more and more that way. They appear to me to be imprisoned in their own locked down rigid minds, filled with condemning, judgmental, hateful voices. They probably turn that energy on others because it is the only option to turning it on themselves. They appear to me to be primarily motivated by the need to be seen as "good, compassionate" people, i.e., which is the exact opposite of who they really are. They pander to black men and trans people, in an obvious effort to get them to see how wonderful and "supportive" they are. To make this work for them, they have to redirect their persisting feelings of hatred against a third party, portraying that person as a mean, cruel, judgmental racist, xphobe, etc.
Values of compassion and kindness are of central importance to most women, and are enshrined in most of the world's great religions. It would be useful to expose the woke as perpetrators of rage, division and hatred. For example, it would be interesting to make video recordings of the faces of the woke as they rage at other white people. Leave out the audio, just show the non-verbals. Most women spend a lot of energy trying to not look like that.
This reminds me of the joke about how you don’t have to out run the bear, you just have to outrun your friend. The worst of the woke army spend all of their time running from the woke bear, pushing down other people to aid their survival.
Why don't we just pretend that we never had slaves in the US - couldn't we just get Fox News to repeat it ten times a show , and then the woke problem would go away !
Thanks for the reply Josh! You just gave me an ingredient that was missing in my analysis: "power." The manipulation I described in my post is called "triangulation." On the internet is usually described in the context of relationships with narcissists. Another thing that is true of narcissists is that their primary motive in relationships is to control the other person and everything about the relationship, including what feelings and opinions the other person is allowed to express.
Most of the people I have met who engage in this particular controlling, hostile, destructive manipulation turned out to be narcissists.
Yes, it appears they have taken over our country. Christopher Lasch analyzed and predicted this would happen: The Culture of Narcissism, 1979. Excellent book.
This is very insightful. Our power rests individually and collectively in the truth. I think we've settled for the individual, considering the moral argument unappealing to the general public. We've seen that it is fundamental.
"Truth is the first casualty of war" and from watching Fox, CNN and MSNBC, it would certainly look like we're at war. The whole purpose of the monetized news networks appear to be angertainment which is very profitable. Unfortunately truth is lost as they focus on their respective groomed audiences and ratings instead of balanced journalism. Our future as a nation depends on an actual reverence for truth.
Great work Chris. We need to dispense with the word salads and stop tip-toeing around "harmful" and "hurtful" words and start calling things like they are. One good place to start is calling wokeness etc. a mental illness or psychiatric condition. Once we've done that we need to try and steer education, politics and general society back to reality.
Can't get eggs from a roster and cant get milk from a bull. Can't identify as a millionaire and try to withdraw cash from a bank. Simple.
The fear of cancellation is overrated and those that have pushed back were successful. As I've said before, once they label everything racist, then nothing will be. This is the year they're unmasked for the manipulative opportunists they are. Keep grinding Chris, slow and steady wins this race.
Dr. Diaz, I have been looking at the pathological labeling as well. We don't usually diagnose a group of people or a political movement, only individuals. Similar movements in the past, however, have been (sort of) diagnosed as mass hysteria, mass psychosis, and so on. In your opinion, does the woke cult consist of a lot of people who individually have personality disorders, or is the mass pathology the result of cultic processes that degrade peoples' rationality. (Or both). Some social psychologists who have posted online have called the cult a "social pathology" that presents as a mass personality disorder. It would be good if we could label it more specifically than that to call out the very ill quality of the thinking process and the public behavior.
The male-to-"woman" trans activists who appear on media all look like exhibitionistic narcissists. Much of the behavior of woke activists generally looks like narcissistic pathology. There is also a BPD quality among some woke constituencies, such as the activists who work at far left nonprofits, have never worked a normal job, and have disordered personal lives.
There are ethical standards involved in applying diagnoses to people we have not evaluated individually, and since the woke control all of our professional associations they would probably come after any licensed professionals who call out their pathology.
Pull the curtains down, and the masks off of any human and you will find their lives are disordered - just to varying degrees. Sorry, but it's not just in the one group of folks you happen to disagree with and find revolting.
Excellent and encouraging post. One observation I've had along these lines is that the most successful pushback against transgender nonsense seems to be the "erasing women" angle and focusing on how much harm it does to young girls, exemplified by very young female de-transitioners like Chloe Cole. From a logical perspective, the simple fact that men are not women should be more than enough to defeat transgender garbage, but unfortunately human beings are wired to prioritize social concerns over objective truth. Many people are quite happy to buy into lies if they believe that the lies make other people feel better. Making them face an eighteen year old girl who has lost her breasts forever, not to mention precious years of her teenage development, is much more effective at breaking through that kind of thinking compared to simply pointing out the untruth of the belief.
Mar 23, 2023·edited Mar 23, 2023Liked by Christopher F. Rufo
Very insightful. Have you seen the recent info - see Jonathan Haidt on substack for a discussion, that the pop. group with the most mental health issues are very liberal White women. No wonder, if they accept the notion that their own race is universally morally flawed. Wow, gee willikers, that would be plumb crazy makin'.
Thanks for the reply, I just found it! Yes, the far left white women appear to be quite an unhappy group. Some of the more moderate women I know are starting to notice that our sisters to the left are afflicted by "a weird guilt," as one of them put it. That is part of what puzzles me about them. It's not like racism just started in the summer of 2020, but maybe they didn't notice it until then.
School choice has been a conservative policy going back to the slave system. Parents who were slaves were not allowed to educate their children the way they saw fit. Any slave or non-slave who attempted to provide an academic education to children born into slavery, an education beyond being indoctrinated in the "naturalness" and "morality" of the slave system, going beyond whatever basic labor skills the master required, would be punished for providing that education. The K-12 agenda on the left is pretty much the same thing today. Forget reading, writing and math as they will instead teach children the rightness of Progressive ideology.
100% - the ideas of Paolo Freire have been thoroughly disseminated through teacher ed. programs. Highly recommend The Marxification of Education by James Lindsay for an in depth analysis of this capture.
Freier's Marxist ideas were a response to the opposite extremism in Brazilian aristocratic circles at the time, the fear of an educated population. That people have brought his ideas into our teacher education programs displays a lack of historical understanding of his experiences. After retiring from the USN, I went through a teacher certification program, and I can attest that you are correct.
Freire's ideas failed wherever they were tried, most notably in Africa. Insane to import them into the United States.
They were imported bc they failed! (or really, whether they failed or succeeded was secondary to the project)
The goal is always and only the DESTRUCTION of all that came before aka The 4 Olds.
Nothing else matters, not children, not country or community or family etc, NOTHING.
Likewise. Thankfully I only had snippets of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in my teacher ed program in 2003, but my friend was assigned the whole thing in 2012 at UCLA :/
I can imagine it’s only gotten worse. Glad I made it out before the full-on indoctrination began.
But Freire was not interested in educating children, but turning them into Marxist true believers and activists, to the complete dereliction of an actual education. The result is almost complete illiteracy and innumeracy in the population.
Some of the staff from my school got a parking ticket downtown yesterday when gathering for the strike. Made me laugh to myself that hey, they are good little revolutionaries in that they can’t read parking signs, but they are politically literate. Freire would be proud. (I justify my snide thoughts bc I was basically voluntold for this strike. No vote, not even my strike.)
Great article! It seems the left has always had the upper hand at utilizing emotions to their advantage...creating hysteria and turning EVERY issue into "emotional soup"...telling everyone how the right only cares about "bottom lines" & making money...and not your feelings & family....
Time for us to turn that frown...upside down!!!😊
I love (LOL) the way that seemingly intelligent people are so quick to infer that "the left" people are all the same, completely unlike conservative people who get most of their news from one source. Very funny comment. I hate to break it to you, but people on the right are extremely complex individuals, just like the people on the left. BTW - God created them all
Seems you have misinterpreted my comment...that's ok ...it's just your opinion...I also see that you have made several other comments that seem to be out of touch with the entire article....what is it that you are really seeking??
I read part of the article by CFR, and reviewed some of the comments but got snagged by a half dozen of them - frequently related to sweeping generalizations and a tireless attempt to make distinctions between Us and Them - which is the focus of my blog. When ANY person makes statements such as - "... The LEFT HAS ALWAYS. . . " OR , "THE RIGHT ONLY CARES ABOUT . . . I think it's both amusing on the one hand, and discouraging on the other.
As I said, I give ALL people credit for being more complex than that. BTW, to me, sweeping generalizations aren't a left or a right thing - so don't take it personally. I do wish you a nice, almost spring, day.
I agree with you...but..since all of the comments are pertaining to CFR's article they are bound to speak to specific issues within the article....namely the commentors experience. I do not wish to paint with a broad brush....this comment was based on my experience. I agree that as a society it seems we (left&right)have lost the art of true and civil debate , genuine concern for the COMMON good & the ability to engage in true compromise on serious issues.
I wholeheartedly agree with the closing line of your statement above - about society. However, I think we just engaged in a brief "true and civil debate". A willingness to seriously debate, find common ground and then accept some compromise is key to us evolving out of the mess we're in. One of my recent posts is about the ongoing barrage of biased information and selective news - https://markvanlaeys.substack.com/p/indoctrination-a-spectrum-phenomena. I sincerely appreciate "talking" with you. Take care, Mark
The left always weaponizes language to make bad things sound good. We must counter with a one-two punch: ridiculing jabs and lofty high minded uppercuts for the KO. Here are terms to use: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-coin-a-term
Spot on Yuri B...!
As you're interested in power and language manipulation, I think you might get something out of this recent post in The TransAtlantic. It's about the way that acronyms are useful/used for hiding power and control in plain sight. Very effective in the information age. If you have any comments, I'd be glad to hear them.
https://thetransatlantic.substack.com/p/the-modern-power-of-the-acronym
Putting people down and calling them names always makes them change their beliefs and turns them into better Christians - right - o
I noticed especially Biden’s recent comment on the trans issue when he used the phrase “almost a sin.” It really struck me that he was moving even into religious territory. I think Christopher has a great point! Let’s use moral/values arguments as we battle identity politics.
Moral / value arguments would be welcome - especially if we focus on the teachings of Christ since we are predominantly a Christian Nation. Jesus rarely put down any groups of people except those who considered themselves holier than others.
Like left wing virtue signalers?
Nope, Right AND Left wing virtue signalers
Sorry disagree. I’m sure there are right wing virtue signalers but the majority voices talking about how righteous they are are left wing. Not sure why you picked my comment to start an argument on, but im not interested in name calling; my comment was to agree with Christopher’s premise. If you don’t agree or don’t like my comment, more power to you! Have a great evening!
Thanks - Enjoy the rest of your weekend too.
“...an ideology based on resentment, revenge, and redistribution...”
Time to start framing “the left” in terms of what they’re really pushing/shoving down our throats, and what the majority of American citizens are completely sick of.
Yes.
This is exactly right. This is a path to s success
One of the values we need to promote is the dignity of hard work. The newly arrived immigrants, legal or not, have a yearning to work their way up in society. We can win hearts by recognizing and rewarding their success. For the broad population we need to recognize and reward small business success. Republicans should initiate some highly visible programs at local levels and national levels to give awards to the most innovative new businesses, or the most new employees hired.
Yes, and explain *why* work has dignity and offer policies to make that insight meaningful.
Very well said , Bob - I agree wholeheartedly. It is so refreshing to read in this thread about something that would lift people up instead of put people down. Both sides have been doing mainly the latter - especially over the last twenty years or so.
Intersectional Identity Politics cannot be gamed. It must be rejected. I'm glad you've arrived at that conclusion. Even on the left they descend into purity spirals. Corey Deangelis and you are both onto something big. Keep on fleshing out these policies and pillars and we'll stand with you all the way to the WH and beyond. Blessings
Great article. Democracy depends on the idea the government has a moral consensus. Not only is the reframing effective to our side, but it also allows far more effective cohesion, removing sperging into various policy details and focusing on getting power.
The next step is to develop an effective media apparatus to replace the ossified platforms we currently have. There are way too many lynchpins to erase our moral framing from public discussion, as the cancelling of Alex Jones shows.
The left definitely snookers Republicans by manipulating language. Case in point: Social Emotional Learning. Thank you for addressing this!
I have the utmost respect and appreciation for your work and I rarely disagree with you. But, as one of the activist "white suburban moms" criticized a few years ago by Arne Duncan, my perspective on school choice is long-range, well-informed, and consequently, somewhat skeptical. The law of unintended consequences is in full bloom. Please hear me out.
I've been watching this closely for too many years, and have seen too many nuances in the implementation & definition, to believe that school choice is the silver bullet your colleague and his employer Betsy DeVos would have us believe. It's NOT just better use of language that is fueling the rush to school choice. For starters, it's more money.
DeVos's foundation also funded and promoted the Common Core movement and scuttled the efforts of Michigan parents who tried to end it in her home state. So DeVos, her foundation, and its lobbyists have not acted in good faith with regard to the impact of her educational agendas on families. They have acted as the adversaries of parents and have not even tried to earn trust. They just rolled over parents in pursuit of their agenda. And as operators of charter schools, they are not exactly objective participants in the school choice discussion. They are throwing money at school choice.
To actually fix the schools, we have to start by removing the Federal control that was codified into federal statute, via ESSA. We have to get rid of the unvalidated and demonstrably low quality "college and career-ready" Common Core 'standards' that have led to the stagnation and then falling NAEP scores. (The pandemic conveniently gets the blame for this, but the real culprit is 10 years of Common Core! Check the numbers, the slide started long before covid!)
And we have to stop the intrusive data-mining of our children and get back to teaching students, not test scores & data points. What good is school choice when EVERY choice is using Common Core-aligned tech platforms and materials (books also went away with CC). It just moves kids to another location to get a lousy common education.
School choice proponents like to cite free market competition, as the key to fixing schools. But this is a false premise, because public schools are NOT remotely 'free.' They are among the most regulated entities in existence! Free market competition is not possible. Nor would that be a good educational model to pursue, for one seeking quality, classical education, and not just the job training that is being pushed as workforce development.
The ill-defined school choice movement has a lot of support from leftist educrats. And a lot of funding from rich and powerful profiteers of every political stripe.
To your point, in the case of school choice, it is not just a better use of language that is helping school choice gain momentum, it is MORE MONEY and more earned media, because of other education issues that school choice profiteers are able to co-opt, and convince people 'choice' will solve. When in actuality, it won't. It's a bandwagon issue.
But a lot of parents who are new to the battle, don't know the long history of education reform, and have not connected the dots to see that school choice is just a way to funnel federal funds - through parents - into private, parochial, and even home schools, to ultimately give the feds TOTAL CONTROL over education. And that would be a win for the Dems.
So - pleeease do not say "color blind" but use the far more powerful "nondiscriminatory"
And the phrase I would like to see replace "woke" is "hateful abasement" or "abasementist". A lot of the woke rhetoric truly does serve to abase White Americans. Never say, "I am not racist." Rather say, "please do not abase my race with a rash accusation."
The vast majority of woke people are white women now. It might not have started out that way but it becomes more and more that way. They appear to me to be imprisoned in their own locked down rigid minds, filled with condemning, judgmental, hateful voices. They probably turn that energy on others because it is the only option to turning it on themselves. They appear to me to be primarily motivated by the need to be seen as "good, compassionate" people, i.e., which is the exact opposite of who they really are. They pander to black men and trans people, in an obvious effort to get them to see how wonderful and "supportive" they are. To make this work for them, they have to redirect their persisting feelings of hatred against a third party, portraying that person as a mean, cruel, judgmental racist, xphobe, etc.
Values of compassion and kindness are of central importance to most women, and are enshrined in most of the world's great religions. It would be useful to expose the woke as perpetrators of rage, division and hatred. For example, it would be interesting to make video recordings of the faces of the woke as they rage at other white people. Leave out the audio, just show the non-verbals. Most women spend a lot of energy trying to not look like that.
This reminds me of the joke about how you don’t have to out run the bear, you just have to outrun your friend. The worst of the woke army spend all of their time running from the woke bear, pushing down other people to aid their survival.
Why don't we just pretend that we never had slaves in the US - couldn't we just get Fox News to repeat it ten times a show , and then the woke problem would go away !
Power is just of just as central importance to women as it is to men.
It's power, not "female compassion," that these woke white women want.
The female sex isn't morally more pure than men. The sooner we cut this nonsense out the better.
But we won't. Women Are Wonderful is a powerful drug.
Thanks for the reply Josh! You just gave me an ingredient that was missing in my analysis: "power." The manipulation I described in my post is called "triangulation." On the internet is usually described in the context of relationships with narcissists. Another thing that is true of narcissists is that their primary motive in relationships is to control the other person and everything about the relationship, including what feelings and opinions the other person is allowed to express.
Most of the people I have met who engage in this particular controlling, hostile, destructive manipulation turned out to be narcissists.
Have you ever noticed how often Melania speaks to her husband Donald when the camaras are rolling? Talk about narcissists and power / control
Yes, it appears they have taken over our country. Christopher Lasch analyzed and predicted this would happen: The Culture of Narcissism, 1979. Excellent book.
This is very insightful. Our power rests individually and collectively in the truth. I think we've settled for the individual, considering the moral argument unappealing to the general public. We've seen that it is fundamental.
"Truth is the first casualty of war" and from watching Fox, CNN and MSNBC, it would certainly look like we're at war. The whole purpose of the monetized news networks appear to be angertainment which is very profitable. Unfortunately truth is lost as they focus on their respective groomed audiences and ratings instead of balanced journalism. Our future as a nation depends on an actual reverence for truth.
Great work Chris. We need to dispense with the word salads and stop tip-toeing around "harmful" and "hurtful" words and start calling things like they are. One good place to start is calling wokeness etc. a mental illness or psychiatric condition. Once we've done that we need to try and steer education, politics and general society back to reality.
Can't get eggs from a roster and cant get milk from a bull. Can't identify as a millionaire and try to withdraw cash from a bank. Simple.
The fear of cancellation is overrated and those that have pushed back were successful. As I've said before, once they label everything racist, then nothing will be. This is the year they're unmasked for the manipulative opportunists they are. Keep grinding Chris, slow and steady wins this race.
Dr. Diaz, I have been looking at the pathological labeling as well. We don't usually diagnose a group of people or a political movement, only individuals. Similar movements in the past, however, have been (sort of) diagnosed as mass hysteria, mass psychosis, and so on. In your opinion, does the woke cult consist of a lot of people who individually have personality disorders, or is the mass pathology the result of cultic processes that degrade peoples' rationality. (Or both). Some social psychologists who have posted online have called the cult a "social pathology" that presents as a mass personality disorder. It would be good if we could label it more specifically than that to call out the very ill quality of the thinking process and the public behavior.
The male-to-"woman" trans activists who appear on media all look like exhibitionistic narcissists. Much of the behavior of woke activists generally looks like narcissistic pathology. There is also a BPD quality among some woke constituencies, such as the activists who work at far left nonprofits, have never worked a normal job, and have disordered personal lives.
There are ethical standards involved in applying diagnoses to people we have not evaluated individually, and since the woke control all of our professional associations they would probably come after any licensed professionals who call out their pathology.
Pull the curtains down, and the masks off of any human and you will find their lives are disordered - just to varying degrees. Sorry, but it's not just in the one group of folks you happen to disagree with and find revolting.
Well said Mr Rufo!
Thanks, Tom.
Excellent and encouraging post. One observation I've had along these lines is that the most successful pushback against transgender nonsense seems to be the "erasing women" angle and focusing on how much harm it does to young girls, exemplified by very young female de-transitioners like Chloe Cole. From a logical perspective, the simple fact that men are not women should be more than enough to defeat transgender garbage, but unfortunately human beings are wired to prioritize social concerns over objective truth. Many people are quite happy to buy into lies if they believe that the lies make other people feel better. Making them face an eighteen year old girl who has lost her breasts forever, not to mention precious years of her teenage development, is much more effective at breaking through that kind of thinking compared to simply pointing out the untruth of the belief.
Very insightful. Have you seen the recent info - see Jonathan Haidt on substack for a discussion, that the pop. group with the most mental health issues are very liberal White women. No wonder, if they accept the notion that their own race is universally morally flawed. Wow, gee willikers, that would be plumb crazy makin'.
I meant this as a reply to Sandra.
Thanks for the reply, I just found it! Yes, the far left white women appear to be quite an unhappy group. Some of the more moderate women I know are starting to notice that our sisters to the left are afflicted by "a weird guilt," as one of them put it. That is part of what puzzles me about them. It's not like racism just started in the summer of 2020, but maybe they didn't notice it until then.
Sorry about the poor selling (above)