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I look forward to how WY continues this riveting story and apologize for repetitive historical references.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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