It's Good to Be BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and Female

 Hollywood and advertising are not the only art forms that have lost their audience through DEI. The poetry world is probably worse, as a Vancouver poet has recently demonstrated.

The result, predictably, has been poetry nobody wants to read.

Speak Free or Die

 

I am not allowed to say this person's sex or name.

I hear that, like the box office failure of a string of recent Hollywood movies, recent “woke” books have failed to earn back their advances. One is “Elliot” Page’s autobiographical account of a female-to-male transition, a $3 million advance. Another, a “queer feminist western,” got a $500,000 advance and sold 3,500 copies.

Meanwhile, white male authors say they cannot get published.

It is possible to see firms like Disney or Anheuser-Busch deciding to take a loss to push politics. One imagines they have a financial cushion. It is harder to explain this in book publishing. Book publishing runs on tight margins, and publishers often go bankrupt. They need to be more careful.

I imagine something else is going on. The editors genuinely thought that the market craved these books. Perhaps, then, this is also the truth for Disney and the others.

Anyone who has been to university these days has been thoroughly indoctrinated in woke ideology. No other views are heard in class; or permitted. To be smart and educated is simply to accept these dogmas. It is easy to graduate imagining that everybody thinks this way, or should think this way, and only needs to be introduced to these ideas to accept their self-evident rightness.

Then, as all other views are unacceptable, they are suppressed if heard. In the classroom, in the media, in business, on the internet. Anyone who expresses them risks losing their livelihood. Some, even most, might privately doubt or disagree, but nobody dares say so. Safer to join in suppressing them so one is not suspected of holding them oneself.

The woke no longer hear any dissent; other than perhaps some “far-right” fringe. It is easy for them to imagine that they represent the vast majority. Silence, after all, implies consent. And so they push on.

But this no longer works when it gets down to individual discretionary spending. Even if you control the airwaves, the publishers, the internet, all the breweries, all the media of distribution, people can simply not buy something they do not need: a beer, or a movie ticket, or a book. They can stop attending church.

It’s not a boycott. It’s just their true preference. Nor are they easily swayed on these matters by lecturing them on their supposed social responsibility—an appeal that might work at the ballot box. One seeks here simple enjoyment, and the thing is fun, or it is not worth the money.

And so, get woke, go broke.

This is an argument against suppressing free speech. Over the longer term, it harms even those in power. Soon they are no longer getting reliable information, are operating in the dark, and will blunder off a cliff.

A New Target

 

Target is now in the sights of the right, joining Bud Light. And the LA Dodgers, North Face, Miller Lite, and others every day now. Having realized their power, the anti-woke have woken up. Boycotts will spread.

Aside from any possible backlash from the normies, why did Target think it would be profitable to carry and devote a large amount of floor space to a line of trans clothes for children? How many trans people do you know? How many do you see walking down the streets? Surely the trans market is miniscule. How many of those items are they likely to sell? 

And yet, they are not prepared even now in the face of collapsing sales to pull the stock. They have only moved it, in some stores, to a less prominent position. 

How big is the trans market for light beer? Yet Budweiser seems prepared to lose billions rather than disavow Mulvaney.

And as for the LA Dodgers: Mulvaney made a thing in his Bud Light ad about trans people being totally uninterested in sports. So how mad is it for the Dodgers to insist, even in the face of popular backlash, on honouring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at centre field? How big is their trans fan base really?

I think that last example holds the key. It is not about the trans. The trans are just the visible symbols, the flagbearers. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are not being honoured because they are trans, but because they mock Christianity. People want to buy trans clothes at Target not because they are trans, or their babies trans, but to show defiance of Christian morality. That is the big market: those who want to reject morality. As a good many people always want to do. Morality means not getting to do what you want.

This is what “woke” means. People seem to have trouble defining the term, but it makes sense as a gnostic reference. To gnostics, morality is for the ignorant masses. They are as if asleep. Superior people, the awakened or enlightened, see beyond that, see that morality is just a way to keep the deplorables in check. As superior beings, they themselves are radically free to do whatever they want. And declaring their freedom from morality declares their superiority as well.

This gnostic concept has infected the great monotheisms from their beginning. Before that, it seems to have infected Classical paganism’s “mystery religions.” The same tendency exists in Hinduism and Buddhism as Tantra. In China, it is represented by Taoism, the undercurrent pulling against Confucian morality. It is also the fundamental concept behind fascism and Nazism. 

Put more simply, and accurately, it is Satanism. As Aleister Crowley put it, “"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

Let us hope the good people are now rising up against it.

Waking Up

 We are accustomed to say we are in a culture war. But what are the two sides? It is not two warring cultures. One side seems in favour of culture, the other opposed. 

Why would anyone be opposed to culture?

The answer is simple: those who seek power oppose culture; cultural norms are a restraint on power. See the Cultural Revolution in China, the French Reign of Terror, or the Cambodian Killing Fields.

So the real battle in the “culture war” is the bullies against the decent common folk. In political terms, say authoritarian government against liberty; but, culturally, it is broader than that. As broad as good against evil; the scribes and Pharisees against those Jesus identified as his own in the Beatitudes.

The bullies see the new technologies as the ideal opportunity for Big Brother—level control. They are pushing for constant oversight, censorship, and control as hard as they can. I have long believed, on the other hand, that the natural consequences of improved communications technology, and technology as a whole, favour over the longer term liberty against the bullies. It is harder for a small group of bullies to control and compel people who can communicate and organize among themselves. Indeed, I suspect that much of the current woke drive to authoritarianism is more a fear reaction to cats escaping bags.

What we currently call “woke” culture is the vanguard of the authoritarian bullying impulse. Consider the things it demands. One is now compelled to say that a man is a woman: the overlords demand the right to dictate reality itself. This is eerily parallel to O’Brien, in 1984, demanding Winston Smith admit that he sees three fingers when O’Brien holds up only two. What could be more complete control than a godlike control over reality itself? This is why bullies gaslight.

Language has long been under their control: “politically correct” is what Orwell called “newspeak.” It has gotten so far as the compulsory use of new pronouns. Or, in Canada, face a prison term.

The right to life has been negated by abortion, and now at warp speed in Canada by euthanasia.

Freedom of conscience, is increasingly denied. Expressing any of the major world religions’ teachings on homosexuality is now illegal. This is not because anyone cares much about homosexual sex or the supposed rights of homosexuals. It is an excuse to suppress religion. Religion, with its ethical restrictions, is the main constraint on bullies everywhere, and they always hate it. They will, at the same time, thoroughly infiltrate it, as did the Biblical Pharisees, for the same reason Saudi Arabia, China, and Afghanistan insist on always having seats on the UN Commission on Human Rights: to co-opt and subvert them. Let God actually appear, and they will try to kill him. 

But mere subversion is not enough. They will also attack frontally. The Catholic Church will be condemned and suppressed, and churches will be burned down with no one held accountable, on the grounds that Catholicism is homophobic; at the same time that a huge proportion of the Catholic clergy are revealed to be active homosexuals, a “velvet mafia.”

The issue is not homosexuality. It is getting rid of morality.

Although the night seems dark, and no place left to turn, there are signs of impending dawn. I anticipated dawn for this spring, and I believe the morning star is here.

Styxenhammer notices an interesting recent shift: previously, when an aggressively woke movie got a low audience score on a site like Rotten Tomatoes, it got a high critics’ score. See the all-female remake of Ghostbusters. The scribes were closing ranks against the common people, who were condemned as misogynists, homophobes, racists, “white supremacists,” “Christian nationalists,” deplorables. However, the recent Queen Cleopatra series, which tries to gaslight the public to accept against all historical evidence that Cleopatra was black, is scoring almost as badly with both the critics and the viewers. Latest tally: 15% among critics, 3% with the audience. 

This suggests the scribes and Pharisees, not all of whom are themselves bullies, some of whom are honest working stiffs who have been bullied into line, or suckered into line or have been going along to get along, like Joseph of Arimathea, are beginning to break ranks. The same thing happened with the nobility in the French Revolution, and it was a crucial moment. 

In the meantime, the general public is also increasingly fed up with this stuff; there is much less of the cap-doffing syndrome and deference to authority than there was a couple of years ago. The woke movies and series are now consistently bombing at the box office: The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan and Wendy, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the latest Star Wars bumpf. Literally, the public isn’t buying it any more.

Polls show that the main issue in the minds of Republicans in the US is now the battle against “wokeness.” Above the economy, above inflation, above government corruption (which is number two), above immigration, above national security.

Somebody has indeed woke; but not as advertised. As with most calculated lies, the term “woke” was always the opposite of the truth.

The bullies always have one great advantage: while they are single-mindedly bent on the acquisition and exercise of power, the average person just wants to either help their neighbour, or be left alone, and assumes the same good will of everyone else. So for some time, the bully can run wild and jackbooted without resistance—in fact, with the help and cooperation of those seeking peace at any price.

As a result, we have seen the rise of “woke” corporations. Their actions seem superficially mad; they are supposed to be making money for their shareholders, not pushing a political agenda. And, generally, the political agenda they push is against the interests and sentiments of their customers. In the case of media platforms, Facebook, YouTube and the like, their profitability depends on being the platform everyone needs to be on to engage in the public discourse. Yet they are banning users, increasingly driving the to other platforms or networks to suppress the public discourse. How can this make business sense?

It actually does. They have learned that if they fall afoul of the demands of the bullies, their business will suffer. There will be demands for boycotts, for divestment, for bans on advertising with them, for freezing their assets, silencing them on social media, and so forth. Disney learned this when they made the villain in The Lion King, Scar, appear to be gay. 

If they appease the bullies, they avoid this. 

As the demands of the bullies grow and grow.

On the other hand, they face little or no downside for this appeasement—because their other customers generally just want to buy a needed product, and do not care much whether a man dresses in women’s clothes, say, or has sex with another man, or whether it was a man or a woman who invented beer.

But the bullies have now overplayed their hand. This was inevitable; when you crave power above all, sooner or later you get drunk on it. They went too far with the pandemic lockdowns, vaccine mandates, suppression of news, defamations, false prosecutions, fake hate crimes, drag shows for children, pornographic children’s books in school libraries, and endless cries of “wolf.” The bullying has gotten too directly threatening for the passive and amoral general public. Now they rise up.

The Bud Light boycott looks like a watershed. The customers showed they now care enough about the woke bullying to do something about it. And they have discovered their power. At last, corporations must calculate on paying a price for appeasing bullies. The woke corporate complex may collapse quickly.

As for the woke political complex, Trump is currently running away with the Republican nomination: up 42 points over his nearest competitor, the highly credible Ron DeSantis. If that trend continues, he will enter the general election with a strong party united behind him. 

Why the Trump surge? Because he has the right enemies. He is being legally persecuted, indicted and prosecuted. This establishes his bone fides as the hero of the common man against the corrupt elite. If the bad guys hate him so, he can be trusted.

The Democratic nomination is being contested by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also has anti-establishment credibility as an anti-vaccination activist. And he is surging in the polls against a sitting president. The usual Democratic backroom chicanery will probably keep him from the nomination; but he will probably weaken Biden in the primaries, encourage others to come out against the establishment “narrative,” and possibly tempt the dark powers to overreach in order to stop him.

In Canada, we now have the rhetorically magnificent Pierre Poilievre. He has apparently decided to make the war on woke a central issue. No doubt he is reading polls, and sees the same surge in concern over wokeness as in the US. I recently saw a clip of Erin O’Toole, and remembered how luck we are to have Poilievre. 

Things will never be as they ought to be, until the clouds part and Jesus comes trailing glory. But I have hopes that in two years, with Trump in power, a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, an originality majority on the Supreme Court, Poilievre presiding over a Conservative government in Canada, and the woke advertising blockade and the regime of censorship on social media broken, the cultural atmosphere will feel quite different.

What Rough Beast?

 

A random comment seen on Twitter, in response to a local school banning Mother’s Day: “woke destroys everything good.”

A simple statement, but truth is usually simple. I think it is deeply true.

Begin with the premise, known and accepted from ancient times, that the purpose of human life is to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is so regardless of your particular religion, regardless even of whether you are a monotheist, a secularist, or a pagan. The absolute value of these three things is intrinsic, self-evident and beyond argument. You simply cannot coherently say that good is not good, or truth is not true. The response to beauty is immediate, unmediated, not a matter for judgment or doubt. The monotheisms merely posit a personal God as the ultimate source and essence of all three.

Now we see a contrary spirit, roaming the landscape as if to devour, a rough beast; which we currently call “woke.” It targets these three, goodness, truth, and beauty, as if a guided missile. 

Begin with motherhood; for the present epidemic seems to have begun here. It is an emblem of the good. In a healthy culture, motherhood is inviolate. Remember “motherhood and apple pie?” This is why the cow is sacred in India: as a symbol of motherhood. Individual mothers fall short, but motherhood itself is an image of selfless love, of wanting the best for the other; and this is the essence of the Good. Perhaps even more, the child’s reverence for the mother or father is an image of the proper loving attitude towards the divine. Which is why we pray the “Our Father.” 

And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

For comparison, it is because they do not nurture their young that serpents and reptiles have become, everywhere, a symbol of moral evil.

Sometime in the early 1960s, the culture turned against motherhood and children. Witness feminism. The premise of feminism is that motherhood is bad; all else follows from this. And this was reinforced, suddenly, with a concern over “overpopulation.” Having children was bad. Indeed, they should be actively done away with. And then we have abortion. Now actually glorified as a kind of sacrament. We are now moving on to genital mutilation of children to ensure that the next generation is infertile.

Homosexuality became admirable, largely or entirely because it does not lead to motherhood and children. 

Parallel is the attack on “conventional morality,” i.e., morality as such, and the common constructivist claim of moral relativism. Churches are vandalized; priests and ministers jailed; crosses replaced by snowflakes. We are now “spiritual, but not religious.” Why the difference? Religion implies a commitment to moral conduct.

The term “woke” is itself an attack on truth. It means here the opposite of its literal meaning. The “woke” become like NPCs. If they think for themselves, if they diverge even slightly from the “narrative”—and this term is itself a denial of truth—they are no longer “woke.” They are like sleepwalkers, in sum. The concept of a “zombie apocalypse” has so captured the popular imagination in recent decades because it is exactly what we are experiencing, day to day.

“Political correctness,” a term that emerged in the 1970s in its current sense, as a shorthand for adherence to “woke” doctrine, is a systematic reversal of the meaning of words, an assault on truth and truth-telling. A spade must not be called a spade. “Exceptional children” are now not the most intelligent or talented, but the least. “Gender-affirming care” destroys one’s gender. “Pro-choice” strips the child, the father, the grandparents of all choice. “Reproductive rights” deny men’s reproductive rights. “Equity” means inequality. “Social justice” means systemic social injustice. “Anti-racism” means racism. “Antifascism” means fascism. “Community” means alienation from your neighbours in favour of strangers who share some political interest. “Health care” means killing, of unborn children or, more recently and increasingly, the old, the poor, the despondent.

The “deplatforming,” the “unfriending,” the censoring, the cancelling, and the “hate laws,” are also an assault on truth, because it is only through free discussion that truth can be sought or known. Now everyone must guard their speech, and anyone who seems to say what they actually believe is, for that reason, and apparently no other, condemned, perhaps fired. Witness Tucker Carlson. Witness Joe Rogan. Witness Trump Derangement Syndrome.

As for the assault on beauty: feminism made a virtue out of making oneself appear ugly. The current issue of “fat shaming” is in this mold: one is now obliged to accept a woman’s declaration that she is beautiful, regardless of one’s own senses. But then, just as often, if you say she is beautiful, you are harassing her. And this is surely at least  a part of the current celebration of crossdressing: the bottom line is that Dylan Mulvaney and other “drag queens” are grotesque, a parody of feminine beauty. 

As for the beauty of art, that has been under attack since perhaps R. Mutt in 1917. Witness more recently the pulling down of statues, of public art, the burning down of beautiful churches, the assaults on paintings in the galleries of Europe.

Many attribute it all to George Soros or to Klaus Schweib and the WEF. But this is not an adequate explanation. Even if they plan evil, these people would not have the power to do so much. They are themselves zombies. The real culprit has to be a powerful spirit with a capability for mind control, for possession, fascination, or ecstasy; these are the characteristics of the pagan gods, the daemons, the obsessions. And a spirit bent systematically on evil and the destruction of man. Perhaps you can, as the Rolling Stones once sang, guess his name. There is a spirit of destruction in the universe, who hates God and mankind.

The term “woke” is a funny little tipoff here. It seems borrowed from the Gnostics, the Satanic heresy that has dogged the monotheisms throughout the centuries. Gnostics imagine themselves superior to the general run of mankind, because they are “awake,” possessing secret knowledge. This puts them above concerns like morality or truth that delude the common rabble. They can create their own morality, invent their own truths. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment was the type. Hitler was apparently an acolyte. Self-styled “elites,” along with those who have been pampered growing up, are particularly vulnerable to such thinking.

Where does this all lead? We must have faith. God is in control, and evil is self-limiting. It will go so far, and then it will collapse.

Pierre Poilievre Defines "Woke"

 

It is a joy to have Poilievre around, if like me you enjoy fine rhetoric. He rarely fails.

A Partial List of Current Leftist Articles of Faith

 

Mostly gleaned from a Twitter thread:

Epstein committed suicide

McAfee committed suicide

Biden won the election

Fraud is impossible in an American federal election

Unless it is done by Russians.

COVID came from a wet market

Conservatives are terrorists

Ivermectin doesn’t work

Hydroxychloraquine doesn’t work

Biden doesn’t have dementia

Biden stutters

Cuomo handled the COVID pandemic better than anyone

Hunter Biden is an artist

Trump colluded with Russia

Trump told people to drink bleach

Biden has never taken money from interests in Russia, China, or the Ukraine

Jan 06 was an insurrection, an attempt to overthrow the constitution and the US government

Men who say they are women are real women

BLM is mostly peaceful

Antifa is just an idea

George Floyd didn’t overdose

The laptop wasn’t really Hunter Biden's laptop. Nothing on it is real.

Trump caused the current outbreak of hate crimes against Asians.

White rage is the biggest problem America faces.

All white people are racist

Black and Hispanic people, or aboriginal people, cannot be racist/

A burst pipe in Atlanta stopped the vote count there

The China travel ban was racist

It is racist to call COVID-19 "the China virus"

There is no problem with referring to a "UK variant," a "Brazilian variant," or a "South African variant"

It is racist, however, to refer to an "India variant"; one must use Greek letters.

Words are violence

Burning down buildings is not violence.

Entering the Capitol Building is violence.

The FBI is apolitical

CNN is straight news

The Obama administration didn’t build cages

Church services spread viruses; casinos and riots do not.

The border is under control

Voter ID is racist

Biden is tough on Putin

Christine Blasey Ford was credible

Eric Swalwell isn’t compromised by having an affair with a Chinese spy

China managed COVID well

The WHO is an independent body, whose opinions are purely based on the science

Gain of Function research wasn’t funded by the US government

A video caused Benghazi

Hunter Biden was hired on merit

“Hands up Don’t Shoot” describes what really happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson

AR15s are weapons of war

Donald Trump called neo-Nazis “fine people”

Fathers don't matter

Only women reproduce; so only women have reproductive rights

Black people cannot get IDs.

A human foetus is not a human

The US Constitution is racist

There is no mental difference between men and women

But women are more caring than men

Anything labelled "fact check" must be true.

Without drastic action, climate change will soon kill us all.

No doubt more to come with a little more reflection. You can probably add your own.

Some of these notions are at least debatable, but the easiest way to look at it, per Occam's razor, is that the left is insane.

The Real Impetus Behind Cancel Culture

 

Do you realize what “cancel culture” is really all about? It is the clearest possible evidence that the left has lost the culture wars. I have seen it happen again and again at the individual level. If someone decisively loses an argument, so much so that they feel they look foolish, they unfriend you. They want to end the conversation by whatever means necessary. Nobody ever concedes or admits they were wrong. Instead, to avoid this, they will predictably attack you on any available premise, and shut down the discussion. They will aggressively assert obvious falsehoods to be true. If they do not have the power to silence you, then they will leave. When it happens, you should know that you have won. They are desperately protecting their crushed ego.

That is exactly what we are seeing now: the “woke” left is declaring everyone a racist and a Nazi, and trying to silence them.

The collapse is bound to happen at any moment, and it may be swift. First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you have won.

Incidentally, the3 black commentator in the clip above is indeed wrong on what is in the Iowa bill, as common sense should have told him. The things he is reading out as prohibited are actually subjects the bill singles out as still to be taught.