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.