Agreed, best entry yet. Electrifying. One important point of the essay is that it is an evasion to address the phenomenon of SI though the narrow lens of freedom of speech, as if our society was governed by constitutional principles, rather than to challenge the substantive ideology, the sociology of the attack, and the means of enforcement, as WY is doing. As for how it is enforced, SI (like Communism in previous generations) has its fellow travelers and allies who do not openly espouse the ideology, but who find it advantageous to let the proponents hunt down their prey, and who shield the proponents from the consequences of their actions. This is an important part of the vertical integration of the process. At the risk of pounding on my one note, Whittaker Chambers discovered that the federal law enforcement establishment did not want to address Communist infiltration and espionage in the federal government. The Communists were thus shielded by a spectrum of supporters ranging from active cooperators (fellow travelers) all the way to passive non-opponents whose activism was expressed merely as partisan enmity towards anti-Communism. When I first encountered leftish academics in the 1970s, with their visceral hatred of McCarthy and Nixon, I was getting a first look at that spectrum. Probably none of them had ever been or even thought of becoming a Communist, but they would dish dirt against anti-Communists for their entire lives. John Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth adds perspective. Roosevelt needed certain Communist-dominated unions in his voting coalition. Well, anti-SI invites the same fear and loathing as anti-Communist, because of the instinctive coalition loyalty, hatred of non-conformity, and fear of the consequences of the core ideology being massively rejected in the general population.
I look forward to how WY continues this riveting story and apologize for repetitive historical references. I suspect, however, that there is continuity between self-interested upper class sponsorship of SI today (and of COVID fear) and self-interested upper class sponsorship of Communism in previous generations. This may sound like a Marxist analysis, but it is also rationalist-empirical and Christian. There is a theory that Trump represented a faction of global capitalism that wanted to preserve the United States as a functioning, self-sustaining economy by mitigating military overreach and dependence on the reserve status of the dollar, and the faction that was willing to let the United States implode under the burden of these and other weaknesses. If there is any truth in this, SI and COVID seem to be tactics of the latter faction.
Toadies of SI: they're everywhere you look. Those of us who keep our mouths shut and avoid conflict certainly bear blame. At best we may preserve something that the fighters and the survivors will need. Onward, WY.
You especially hit the nail on the head by naming that thing in which "no one had even heard of the offense before it was conjured into being through the act of conviction itself" and pointing out that this has been "the stock in trade of the ideological succession for years." That's exactly it. And the simple result of this is that the woke continuously expand their own jurisdiction, laying claim to an ever-increasing geography of wrongs they have to be consulted on. The more obscure or esoteric the industry/scenario (remember realtors' violence in using the term "master bedrooms"?), the better they can simultaneously demonstrate, reinforce, and expand their culture power. The map of LITERAL VIOLENCE continuously unfurls. The end game eventually being that not only will you have to hire a DEI consultant if you're a realtor, you'll have to hire a DEI consultant if you're *anything* -- because if they came for home realtors, why believe they won't come for you if you're, say, a scuba dive instructor? After all -- the woke claim they've read their Foucault -- and Foucault was quite right to define discipline as "the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise" and point out that the most effective discipline results from nothing more than the individual fearing surveillance from a powerful other.
I’m glad you’re focusing specifically on this phenomenon with this blog. If you look at where the trajectory of all of this may go, it is hard to see an opposing force within the national boundaries or even the boundaries of western countries that could sufficiently slow or stop what appears to be a complete takeover of our society and culture by this ideology.
Some quick inductive reasoning: It seems this process will lead to a weakened social cohesion -obviously- which therefore makes us vulnerable to outside forces that have an interest in obtaining the geographic and material wealth we have in this country; I.e., continue the pattern of the entire history of humanity. Candidates for these hungry nations would seem to be those that are impervious to this ideology. Asian countries seem to be. Many eastern European countries seem to be. It’s not easy to say which, when and if any if these potential countries could have the capacity to achieve this (China is the obvious choice), and at what point our society is sufficiently self-enfeebled for this to occur. But I struggle to see how this doesn’t happen at some undetermined point in the future if this country continues to indulge in this unseemly and unfortunate decadence.
Just my $.02. China. They'll just watch and try to handle their own domestic problems. As their economy overtakes ours we just won't have any capability to fight back. They may not even BOTHER to take over the country, if they can just get world domination without it. AFAIK, and of course, ICBW.
I suppose it’s possible that there is no geographical or “hard take over,” but more of a natural falling into the gravity of a greater power.
I am also startled by how unbalanced we are in our broad learning structure. Our young and our fanatical people are far too influential and have way too much power. I noticed it increasingly within the past decades, but now… now there is simply no coherent system that values wisdom and experience. The people who have been around and know some things about people and the world and who have received interpreted and are willing to give their understanding of this are not paid any attention. There’s no way a society can continue that is ruled by its most unwise constituents.
I assume you mean 1820 rather than 1920 and are referencing the case of James Miranda Stuart Barry who performed the first successful c-section. Barry grew up as Mary-Ann Bulkley. She became James Barry in 1809 and studied medicine at Edinburgh. For the next 56 years, Barry lived as a man in private and public life. Her true sex was only discovered after Barry died as the laying out woman said that her body had pregnancy stretch marks. Some held that Barry was intersex and that it would be impossible to conceal an identity for so long.
It is impossible to know the true reasons for why Bulkley practiced the deception.
Huh! Kelly says 1920s in the interview. I guess the fact that the disciplinary process happened is an important fact but the fact that it later found a publisher does somewhat alter the picture.
I don't think the subsequent publication changes the arc of the story very much. An editor was punished for promoting a manuscript that was out of tune with the new ideology. The fact that another editor didn't suffer the same fate just shows how capricious this all can be. And the capriciousness is part of what's unnerving.
Kelly could have easily been mistaken about the date. By 1920, there was no point in hiding one's sex in Britain for employment (or indeed the US) as the profession was no longer rigidly gendered.
Women officially became *people* in 1919 in Britain and were allowed into the professions such as the law. Thus there would have been no point in Bulkley hiding her sex then as she could have attended medical school etc. I do think Bulkley/Barry knew precisely what her sex was and as a medical professional she would have known that it would be impossible to change it. Given her pregnancy stretch marks, it would seem she confided in at least one other person (male) who kept her secret. It is sort of incredible that the secret lasted 56 years but those were different times.
The concept of being able to *change* your sex doesn't happen until the 1950s, possibly late 1940s.
However, as any reputable medical professional will tell you -- it is impossible to outrun your genes (ie you can't alter your DNA)
That the disciplinary process happened is interesting and worrying. But at least there is a happy ending.
I haven't read the book and don't know how the author handled the pronouns. I assume she would have to use the first person narrative for the Barry character rather than third person in today's culture. I just know the story about Barry -- I've written several women fulfilling nonconforming gender roles for Harlequin Historical and Robert Hale so have an interest in the subject.
What is interesting (in a way) is here is this female doctor who did all this interesting stuff but is not recognised as one of the first female doctors in Britain because she lived the life of a male doctor in the British Royal Navy. If you look it up, you will find Elizabeth Garret Anderson listed as the first female British doctor. Anderson takes her medical exams in 1865. Barry dies in 1865, having been involved in the medical profession since 1809. Barry's records were sealed for 100 years after her death.
Wesley, I love your thoughtful and provocative writing - and you are certainly among the few brave journalists contributing to sanity in our current environment. That said, your essay today was complete nonsense, and contradictory in its message. To say that cowardice (individual and collective) is not at the root of this problem is just complete nonsense. The actual number of American’s who believe the radical ideology of the progressive/woke movement is relatively small. What is ENORMOUS is the number of liberals and centrist conservatives who do not have the BALLS to stand up and oppose this nonsense. These fringe nuts would be disempowered immediately, if all of the cowards who do not actually agree would stand up and oppose them.
And, to say that we should not have to make any personal sacrifices to protect our democratic Republic just boils my blood. Tell the greatest generation that they really didn’t need to stand up to the tyrants in Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan and many other parts of Eastern Europe to protect freedom and democracy. Tell them that being called a name, not getting invited to a party, or even being fired, is too big a sacrifice to make to protect us from ruin.
I will refer you to Bari Weiss’ essay today for some insight into the central role of cowardice in fueling the radical progressive/woke ideology. The solution to this problem is for the shamed to become the shamers - and cowardice must again be a source of shame.
It looks like cowardice but it is self-preservation. People know, they feel it, they understand their own luck and they don’t tempt fate, they’ve got a good job and no way they risk it on principle. Survival, that’s the adult game.
While I find it hard to believe I am going to be convinced that cowardice is not at the root of this problem, I will respectfully await your additional contributions to this subject and consume them with an open mind. Thanks for the reply.
I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, yes, it's cowardice, and probably if the "adults in charge" had put their foot down say, five years ago, they could've stopped it. At this point, as jt points out below, you are asking people to risk their livelihoods over a cultural matter that yes, they disagree with, but is not exactly the same as actual warfare or something that has a HUGE impact on their life, and I'm not sure that's fair.
The reality is that the "cowards" are those who could absolutely lose their livelihoods -- the lawyers, journalists, managers, i.e. the professional class who are supporting this. Many of them make quite nice incomes, but have no significant wealth, and losing their job and ability to be hired in their industry would be ruinous. Notably, most of these professions (except journalists) are (1) majorly overpaid, and (2) about 70% of the job is about maintaining one's reputation for being smart, in the know, and socially prestigious. It is highly unlikely that a plumber or carpenter or someone with hard, tangible skills that aren't dependent on a network of other professionals would actually lose his livelihood if he or she makes tweets or statements that go against the orthodoxy. The professional very well might. So I suppose it is not surprising that the people who aren't playing ball tend to be from the class of people who are probably not at risk of losing their jobs, while the ones who are acting like wimps are the ones who are. I don't see it as a difference in cowardice so much as natural responses to level of risk and how much one has to lose -- people reacting rationally to incentives.
This is unfortunately why legislation may be the only way to solve the issue -- and specifically with ballot initiatives. I guarantee if CA has a ballot initiative regarding removing sex from birth certificates or whatever Newsom just signed into law, the voters will overwhelmingly reject it. Because no one sees how you vote.
5 years ago? How about 30 years ago, when the University of California was blatantly creating racial set-asides for junior faculty hiring? The "Targeted Opportunity Program."
I spent most-a the day over at M. Weiss's Substack, but I have a slightly different take on this. It's pretty easy to SAY people should risk their livelihoods to defend Democracy. I'm not at all sure that M. Weiss DID so, but I still congratulated her on her efforts.
I may be misinterpreting what M. Yang is saying, but what *I* would say is that what we have here, as I said over there and also on Professor Loury's Substack is that what we're dealing with here is an EXTREME Left-Wing FUNDAMENTALIST RELIGION. Read "Minds Wide Shut" if You don't believe me.
And what's going on is that the Successor Regime is waging a Religious CRUSADE. They're taking NO PRISONERS. It takes a lotta guts for ANYBODY to say anything, let alone people who need to make a living. I dunno I'd say much if I wasn't retired. Dunno. Since it's impossible to say, I won't.
POINT is that it's gonna take a small army to combat this mess, right? Against a Religious CRUSADE that is EXTREMELY well-funded, EXTREMELY well-organized and decentralized to boot.
Name an industry that HASN'T been effected by this contagion? I can't.
I type fast, hit [Post] and then read what I wrote.
WHere I said "industry" I should-a said "institution." Government, gone. Academia, came OUTTA there. Culture, business. Who have I left out. No matter, they've gone religious. FUNDAMENTALIST Wokeianity,.
It isn't cowardice, because at the heart of this is agreement. The cowardice comes from people just trying to live their lives. The bones of this ideology have been taught at the higher levels of US education, the Harvards and Yales, that have been the feedlots for the C-suite for decades. It was able to worm its way into those institutions of higher learning due to the complicity of the people running them.
Nothing that an HR dept. does is out of sight or control of the C-suite, governmental or business. Now, some of it comes down to the removal of competitors, but much of it is akin to a new religion spreading.
This is not caused solely by cowardice, but also by lack of coordination. This is explained better in https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/ & the last section of https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/ , but basically: If just a few people "stand up and oppose this nonsense", as you put it, they are a small enough minority to be punished by the illiberal progressives with the passive support of the majority. If a lot of people stand up, they will be too many for this to work & may be able to entirely disempower the currently dominant extremists. So, if you know that lots of people agree with you & 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐨𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮, you will be willing to stand up since you know you will probably win. If you don't know that many other people agree with you, or don't know that the other people who agree with you will stand up with you, then you are risking losing your job or having your reputation ruined for a rather smaller chance of success, & only the most courageous people are generally willing to make that choice. Moreover, building common knowledge of your & your allies' agreement & willingness to stand up together requires that you declare that you agree with the idea whose taboo you wish to overcome, which itself carries a risk of 'cancellation' if this declaration is discovered by your enemies, & so is similarly unappealing to most people. So this form of coordinated pressure to silence opposition is an equilibrium.
This can be overcome — see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/04/respectability-cascades/ for some discussion of how this might happen — but it seems to me that a common result is not tolerance, but the orthodox & suppressed ideas switching places. E.g. in the South in the early 20th century, racism was mainstream & anti-racism (𝑠𝑒̄𝑛𝑠𝑢̄ 𝑙𝑎̄𝑡𝑜̄) was taboo; now anti-racism is mainstream & racism is taboo. In the mid-20th century in America, homophobia & transphobia (as they are now called) were mainstream & homosexuality & transgenderness were taboo; now acceptance of homosexuality & transgenderness is mainstream & homophobia & transphobia are taboo.
The Chappelle thing illustrates just how vulnerable to the confirmation bias high priests of SI really are. As people have been losing their jobs and/or reputations (canceled) explicitly based on left wing ideology, the response from even prominent leftists (including philosopher Elizabeth Anderson) has been that private companies get to decide who they hire and fire, so what's the big deal? Yet with Chappelle, a similar argument could be made regarding what shows Netflix decides to greenlight. But is that argument made? No, because it has never been about the universal claim to the rights of a company to handle their business, it's about the ideology in question.
The Chappelle controversy also illustrates how wokeism eats its own imo. As Coleman Hughes tweeted, Chappelle's Closer is basically a plea for race to trump trans in the oppression Olympics.
So Chappelle isn't fighting for the side of "free speech", and even less so for the side which questions the validity of SI - he's simply fighting a turf war over the the space that SI is conquering.
I don't disagree, but I don't think he's against free speech either. Plus, he may be fighting the turf war but he's also making a point about the moral confusion of the left in general, which can be seen in his bit about DaBaby having killed someone.
Yes this change is in ascendancy and it’s not about to stop: rendered permanent. Your children are conditioned to therapeutic thinking from kindergarten on. We have weaponized our children, they are fully indoctrinated - go speak to them.
"Perhaps you can anticipate what happened next. The book was attacked by other staffers for its failure to portray the woman who posed as a man in order to practice medicine as transgendered. The author had failed to frame her story through an anachronistic projection of today's gender ideology onto a past in which the ideology did not yet exist. This meant her work was therefore “transphobic.” The editor was reported to HR for forcing them to read the book and subject to a disciplinary process."
This reads like a Monty Python skit that would have been hilarious if fictional even until about 2010ish, but like most Monty-Python-skit-like anecdotes represents a horror story of a society gone off-the-rails when true.
The process summarized in the final paragraph reminded me of the Oberlin admin/faculty who, in an email regarding the "racist" Gibson's bakery, suggested that it was a good time to "unleash the students."
Wesley, I wanted to point out this article to you as it is a fascinating platform for seeing how Successor Ideology affects field after field: "Forensic anthropologists can try to identify a person’s race from a skull. Should they?"
As you know, it is undisputed orthodoxy that race is 100% social construct. Yet this:
"Among about 250 resolved cases in which forensic anthropologists offered an ancestry estimate, they correctly identified a person’s social race about 90% of the time, the team reported in April in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. But when anthropologists identified someone’s ancestry as “mixed” or “other,” they were wrong 80% of the time."
However, some forensic scientists are attempting to end the use of skull measurements, etc to deduce race. Although the article does not clearly state it, the fact that race can be deduced a large portion of the time from something biological, tilts against cultural construction orthodoxy, so the practice looks to be dropped or curved lest people think that race is in part biological.
The weird thing is that all the things that allow people to classify others' race are themselves clearly biological. What else could skin color and facial features be besides biological?
Agreed, best entry yet. Electrifying. One important point of the essay is that it is an evasion to address the phenomenon of SI though the narrow lens of freedom of speech, as if our society was governed by constitutional principles, rather than to challenge the substantive ideology, the sociology of the attack, and the means of enforcement, as WY is doing. As for how it is enforced, SI (like Communism in previous generations) has its fellow travelers and allies who do not openly espouse the ideology, but who find it advantageous to let the proponents hunt down their prey, and who shield the proponents from the consequences of their actions. This is an important part of the vertical integration of the process. At the risk of pounding on my one note, Whittaker Chambers discovered that the federal law enforcement establishment did not want to address Communist infiltration and espionage in the federal government. The Communists were thus shielded by a spectrum of supporters ranging from active cooperators (fellow travelers) all the way to passive non-opponents whose activism was expressed merely as partisan enmity towards anti-Communism. When I first encountered leftish academics in the 1970s, with their visceral hatred of McCarthy and Nixon, I was getting a first look at that spectrum. Probably none of them had ever been or even thought of becoming a Communist, but they would dish dirt against anti-Communists for their entire lives. John Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth adds perspective. Roosevelt needed certain Communist-dominated unions in his voting coalition. Well, anti-SI invites the same fear and loathing as anti-Communist, because of the instinctive coalition loyalty, hatred of non-conformity, and fear of the consequences of the core ideology being massively rejected in the general population.
I look forward to how WY continues this riveting story and apologize for repetitive historical references. I suspect, however, that there is continuity between self-interested upper class sponsorship of SI today (and of COVID fear) and self-interested upper class sponsorship of Communism in previous generations. This may sound like a Marxist analysis, but it is also rationalist-empirical and Christian. There is a theory that Trump represented a faction of global capitalism that wanted to preserve the United States as a functioning, self-sustaining economy by mitigating military overreach and dependence on the reserve status of the dollar, and the faction that was willing to let the United States implode under the burden of these and other weaknesses. If there is any truth in this, SI and COVID seem to be tactics of the latter faction.
Toadies of SI: they're everywhere you look. Those of us who keep our mouths shut and avoid conflict certainly bear blame. At best we may preserve something that the fighters and the survivors will need. Onward, WY.
Meant, "AGAINST the faction that was willing to let the United States implode..."
You especially hit the nail on the head by naming that thing in which "no one had even heard of the offense before it was conjured into being through the act of conviction itself" and pointing out that this has been "the stock in trade of the ideological succession for years." That's exactly it. And the simple result of this is that the woke continuously expand their own jurisdiction, laying claim to an ever-increasing geography of wrongs they have to be consulted on. The more obscure or esoteric the industry/scenario (remember realtors' violence in using the term "master bedrooms"?), the better they can simultaneously demonstrate, reinforce, and expand their culture power. The map of LITERAL VIOLENCE continuously unfurls. The end game eventually being that not only will you have to hire a DEI consultant if you're a realtor, you'll have to hire a DEI consultant if you're *anything* -- because if they came for home realtors, why believe they won't come for you if you're, say, a scuba dive instructor? After all -- the woke claim they've read their Foucault -- and Foucault was quite right to define discipline as "the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise" and point out that the most effective discipline results from nothing more than the individual fearing surveillance from a powerful other.
I’m glad you’re focusing specifically on this phenomenon with this blog. If you look at where the trajectory of all of this may go, it is hard to see an opposing force within the national boundaries or even the boundaries of western countries that could sufficiently slow or stop what appears to be a complete takeover of our society and culture by this ideology.
Some quick inductive reasoning: It seems this process will lead to a weakened social cohesion -obviously- which therefore makes us vulnerable to outside forces that have an interest in obtaining the geographic and material wealth we have in this country; I.e., continue the pattern of the entire history of humanity. Candidates for these hungry nations would seem to be those that are impervious to this ideology. Asian countries seem to be. Many eastern European countries seem to be. It’s not easy to say which, when and if any if these potential countries could have the capacity to achieve this (China is the obvious choice), and at what point our society is sufficiently self-enfeebled for this to occur. But I struggle to see how this doesn’t happen at some undetermined point in the future if this country continues to indulge in this unseemly and unfortunate decadence.
Just my $.02. China. They'll just watch and try to handle their own domestic problems. As their economy overtakes ours we just won't have any capability to fight back. They may not even BOTHER to take over the country, if they can just get world domination without it. AFAIK, and of course, ICBW.
I suppose it’s possible that there is no geographical or “hard take over,” but more of a natural falling into the gravity of a greater power.
I am also startled by how unbalanced we are in our broad learning structure. Our young and our fanatical people are far too influential and have way too much power. I noticed it increasingly within the past decades, but now… now there is simply no coherent system that values wisdom and experience. The people who have been around and know some things about people and the world and who have received interpreted and are willing to give their understanding of this are not paid any attention. There’s no way a society can continue that is ruled by its most unwise constituents.
Yah, You NAILED it!
I assume you mean 1820 rather than 1920 and are referencing the case of James Miranda Stuart Barry who performed the first successful c-section. Barry grew up as Mary-Ann Bulkley. She became James Barry in 1809 and studied medicine at Edinburgh. For the next 56 years, Barry lived as a man in private and public life. Her true sex was only discovered after Barry died as the laying out woman said that her body had pregnancy stretch marks. Some held that Barry was intersex and that it would be impossible to conceal an identity for so long.
It is impossible to know the true reasons for why Bulkley practiced the deception.
EJ Levy's debut novel The Cape Doctor which is based on this and apparently caused some controversy in 2019 has been published by Little Brown 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/books/review/cape-doctor-ej-levy-catherine-chidgey-remote-sympathy-jonathan-lee-great-mistake-jh-gelernter-hold-fast.html
Huh! Kelly says 1920s in the interview. I guess the fact that the disciplinary process happened is an important fact but the fact that it later found a publisher does somewhat alter the picture.
I don't think the subsequent publication changes the arc of the story very much. An editor was punished for promoting a manuscript that was out of tune with the new ideology. The fact that another editor didn't suffer the same fate just shows how capricious this all can be. And the capriciousness is part of what's unnerving.
Kelly could have easily been mistaken about the date. By 1920, there was no point in hiding one's sex in Britain for employment (or indeed the US) as the profession was no longer rigidly gendered.
Women officially became *people* in 1919 in Britain and were allowed into the professions such as the law. Thus there would have been no point in Bulkley hiding her sex then as she could have attended medical school etc. I do think Bulkley/Barry knew precisely what her sex was and as a medical professional she would have known that it would be impossible to change it. Given her pregnancy stretch marks, it would seem she confided in at least one other person (male) who kept her secret. It is sort of incredible that the secret lasted 56 years but those were different times.
The concept of being able to *change* your sex doesn't happen until the 1950s, possibly late 1940s.
However, as any reputable medical professional will tell you -- it is impossible to outrun your genes (ie you can't alter your DNA)
That the disciplinary process happened is interesting and worrying. But at least there is a happy ending.
I haven't read the book and don't know how the author handled the pronouns. I assume she would have to use the first person narrative for the Barry character rather than third person in today's culture. I just know the story about Barry -- I've written several women fulfilling nonconforming gender roles for Harlequin Historical and Robert Hale so have an interest in the subject.
What is interesting (in a way) is here is this female doctor who did all this interesting stuff but is not recognised as one of the first female doctors in Britain because she lived the life of a male doctor in the British Royal Navy. If you look it up, you will find Elizabeth Garret Anderson listed as the first female British doctor. Anderson takes her medical exams in 1865. Barry dies in 1865, having been involved in the medical profession since 1809. Barry's records were sealed for 100 years after her death.
I wouldn't regard Megyn Kelly as a particularly reliable source.
Wesley, I love your thoughtful and provocative writing - and you are certainly among the few brave journalists contributing to sanity in our current environment. That said, your essay today was complete nonsense, and contradictory in its message. To say that cowardice (individual and collective) is not at the root of this problem is just complete nonsense. The actual number of American’s who believe the radical ideology of the progressive/woke movement is relatively small. What is ENORMOUS is the number of liberals and centrist conservatives who do not have the BALLS to stand up and oppose this nonsense. These fringe nuts would be disempowered immediately, if all of the cowards who do not actually agree would stand up and oppose them.
And, to say that we should not have to make any personal sacrifices to protect our democratic Republic just boils my blood. Tell the greatest generation that they really didn’t need to stand up to the tyrants in Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan and many other parts of Eastern Europe to protect freedom and democracy. Tell them that being called a name, not getting invited to a party, or even being fired, is too big a sacrifice to make to protect us from ruin.
I will refer you to Bari Weiss’ essay today for some insight into the central role of cowardice in fueling the radical progressive/woke ideology. The solution to this problem is for the shamed to become the shamers - and cowardice must again be a source of shame.
There is plenty of cowardice but it’s not actually decisive. We will go over the reasons why in this week’s subsequent posts
It looks like cowardice but it is self-preservation. People know, they feel it, they understand their own luck and they don’t tempt fate, they’ve got a good job and no way they risk it on principle. Survival, that’s the adult game.
While I find it hard to believe I am going to be convinced that cowardice is not at the root of this problem, I will respectfully await your additional contributions to this subject and consume them with an open mind. Thanks for the reply.
I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, yes, it's cowardice, and probably if the "adults in charge" had put their foot down say, five years ago, they could've stopped it. At this point, as jt points out below, you are asking people to risk their livelihoods over a cultural matter that yes, they disagree with, but is not exactly the same as actual warfare or something that has a HUGE impact on their life, and I'm not sure that's fair.
The reality is that the "cowards" are those who could absolutely lose their livelihoods -- the lawyers, journalists, managers, i.e. the professional class who are supporting this. Many of them make quite nice incomes, but have no significant wealth, and losing their job and ability to be hired in their industry would be ruinous. Notably, most of these professions (except journalists) are (1) majorly overpaid, and (2) about 70% of the job is about maintaining one's reputation for being smart, in the know, and socially prestigious. It is highly unlikely that a plumber or carpenter or someone with hard, tangible skills that aren't dependent on a network of other professionals would actually lose his livelihood if he or she makes tweets or statements that go against the orthodoxy. The professional very well might. So I suppose it is not surprising that the people who aren't playing ball tend to be from the class of people who are probably not at risk of losing their jobs, while the ones who are acting like wimps are the ones who are. I don't see it as a difference in cowardice so much as natural responses to level of risk and how much one has to lose -- people reacting rationally to incentives.
This is unfortunately why legislation may be the only way to solve the issue -- and specifically with ballot initiatives. I guarantee if CA has a ballot initiative regarding removing sex from birth certificates or whatever Newsom just signed into law, the voters will overwhelmingly reject it. Because no one sees how you vote.
5 years ago? How about 30 years ago, when the University of California was blatantly creating racial set-asides for junior faculty hiring? The "Targeted Opportunity Program."
Yah. THe BALLOT. Still...
I spent most-a the day over at M. Weiss's Substack, but I have a slightly different take on this. It's pretty easy to SAY people should risk their livelihoods to defend Democracy. I'm not at all sure that M. Weiss DID so, but I still congratulated her on her efforts.
I may be misinterpreting what M. Yang is saying, but what *I* would say is that what we have here, as I said over there and also on Professor Loury's Substack is that what we're dealing with here is an EXTREME Left-Wing FUNDAMENTALIST RELIGION. Read "Minds Wide Shut" if You don't believe me.
And what's going on is that the Successor Regime is waging a Religious CRUSADE. They're taking NO PRISONERS. It takes a lotta guts for ANYBODY to say anything, let alone people who need to make a living. I dunno I'd say much if I wasn't retired. Dunno. Since it's impossible to say, I won't.
POINT is that it's gonna take a small army to combat this mess, right? Against a Religious CRUSADE that is EXTREMELY well-funded, EXTREMELY well-organized and decentralized to boot.
Name an industry that HASN'T been effected by this contagion? I can't.
I type fast, hit [Post] and then read what I wrote.
WHere I said "industry" I should-a said "institution." Government, gone. Academia, came OUTTA there. Culture, business. Who have I left out. No matter, they've gone religious. FUNDAMENTALIST Wokeianity,.
It isn't cowardice, because at the heart of this is agreement. The cowardice comes from people just trying to live their lives. The bones of this ideology have been taught at the higher levels of US education, the Harvards and Yales, that have been the feedlots for the C-suite for decades. It was able to worm its way into those institutions of higher learning due to the complicity of the people running them.
Nothing that an HR dept. does is out of sight or control of the C-suite, governmental or business. Now, some of it comes down to the removal of competitors, but much of it is akin to a new religion spreading.
This is not caused solely by cowardice, but also by lack of coordination. This is explained better in https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/ & the last section of https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/ , but basically: If just a few people "stand up and oppose this nonsense", as you put it, they are a small enough minority to be punished by the illiberal progressives with the passive support of the majority. If a lot of people stand up, they will be too many for this to work & may be able to entirely disempower the currently dominant extremists. So, if you know that lots of people agree with you & 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐨𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮, you will be willing to stand up since you know you will probably win. If you don't know that many other people agree with you, or don't know that the other people who agree with you will stand up with you, then you are risking losing your job or having your reputation ruined for a rather smaller chance of success, & only the most courageous people are generally willing to make that choice. Moreover, building common knowledge of your & your allies' agreement & willingness to stand up together requires that you declare that you agree with the idea whose taboo you wish to overcome, which itself carries a risk of 'cancellation' if this declaration is discovered by your enemies, & so is similarly unappealing to most people. So this form of coordinated pressure to silence opposition is an equilibrium.
This can be overcome — see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/04/respectability-cascades/ for some discussion of how this might happen — but it seems to me that a common result is not tolerance, but the orthodox & suppressed ideas switching places. E.g. in the South in the early 20th century, racism was mainstream & anti-racism (𝑠𝑒̄𝑛𝑠𝑢̄ 𝑙𝑎̄𝑡𝑜̄) was taboo; now anti-racism is mainstream & racism is taboo. In the mid-20th century in America, homophobia & transphobia (as they are now called) were mainstream & homosexuality & transgenderness were taboo; now acceptance of homosexuality & transgenderness is mainstream & homophobia & transphobia are taboo.
See "Dictatorship of the small minority" or something like that. Taleb. Systems theory.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
But is preference falsification the same as cowardice?
The Chappelle thing illustrates just how vulnerable to the confirmation bias high priests of SI really are. As people have been losing their jobs and/or reputations (canceled) explicitly based on left wing ideology, the response from even prominent leftists (including philosopher Elizabeth Anderson) has been that private companies get to decide who they hire and fire, so what's the big deal? Yet with Chappelle, a similar argument could be made regarding what shows Netflix decides to greenlight. But is that argument made? No, because it has never been about the universal claim to the rights of a company to handle their business, it's about the ideology in question.
The Chappelle controversy also illustrates how wokeism eats its own imo. As Coleman Hughes tweeted, Chappelle's Closer is basically a plea for race to trump trans in the oppression Olympics.
So Chappelle isn't fighting for the side of "free speech", and even less so for the side which questions the validity of SI - he's simply fighting a turf war over the the space that SI is conquering.
I don't disagree, but I don't think he's against free speech either. Plus, he may be fighting the turf war but he's also making a point about the moral confusion of the left in general, which can be seen in his bit about DaBaby having killed someone.
This is your best entry yet. Outstanding.
Yes this change is in ascendancy and it’s not about to stop: rendered permanent. Your children are conditioned to therapeutic thinking from kindergarten on. We have weaponized our children, they are fully indoctrinated - go speak to them.
Excellent piece!
So part of what you are saying here seems to be that the Successor Ideology depends on Institutionalized Wokism, yes?
"Perhaps you can anticipate what happened next. The book was attacked by other staffers for its failure to portray the woman who posed as a man in order to practice medicine as transgendered. The author had failed to frame her story through an anachronistic projection of today's gender ideology onto a past in which the ideology did not yet exist. This meant her work was therefore “transphobic.” The editor was reported to HR for forcing them to read the book and subject to a disciplinary process."
This reads like a Monty Python skit that would have been hilarious if fictional even until about 2010ish, but like most Monty-Python-skit-like anecdotes represents a horror story of a society gone off-the-rails when true.
To be fair, the letter you posted explicitly asked Matt Y *not* be fired. Not that I disagree with any of the points you made in the article.
> "This is what the movement aims at and what it has made significant progress in bringing about."
Do you believe there exists *a movement* organized towards these aims? Or is that intended to be metaphorical?
Thank you for articulating this, it gives me hope.
The process summarized in the final paragraph reminded me of the Oberlin admin/faculty who, in an email regarding the "racist" Gibson's bakery, suggested that it was a good time to "unleash the students."
Wesley, I wanted to point out this article to you as it is a fascinating platform for seeing how Successor Ideology affects field after field: "Forensic anthropologists can try to identify a person’s race from a skull. Should they?"
As you know, it is undisputed orthodoxy that race is 100% social construct. Yet this:
"Among about 250 resolved cases in which forensic anthropologists offered an ancestry estimate, they correctly identified a person’s social race about 90% of the time, the team reported in April in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. But when anthropologists identified someone’s ancestry as “mixed” or “other,” they were wrong 80% of the time."
However, some forensic scientists are attempting to end the use of skull measurements, etc to deduce race. Although the article does not clearly state it, the fact that race can be deduced a large portion of the time from something biological, tilts against cultural construction orthodoxy, so the practice looks to be dropped or curved lest people think that race is in part biological.
https://www.science.org/content/article/forensic-anthropologists-can-try-identify-person-s-race-skull-should-they?utm_campaign=news_daily_2021-10-18&et_rid=17206289&et_cid=3962582
The weird thing is that all the things that allow people to classify others' race are themselves clearly biological. What else could skin color and facial features be besides biological?