Legacy Thread

[basserdan]

Kunstler: The Trials of Wokery

By James Howard Kunstler
February 12, 2021

How do you like the party you supposedly voted into power so far? Or is it perhaps too much to say they were actually voted into anything? And if so — if there was something, let’s say, a little irregular with the ballot tabulation, maybe even more than a little — have they not succeeded splendidly in pissing-off more than half the people across the land? And then attempted to rub that half’s faces into the squishy, fetid loam of the DC Swamp?

I’d say that every move they make, every breath they take, seems calculated to spark a new civil war. Yesterday’s spiteful exercise in cognitive dissonance was a humdinger: Mr. Biden threatened to cut off travel to Florida for flouting his regime’s policy on Covid-19 lockdowns, while over in Texas (and several other states), he ordered a general unlocking-down of the border with Mexico, permitting the unchecked illegal ingress of thousands of possible Covid-19 carriers a day. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, responded, saying — if I may paraphrase — see you in court, asshole.

Meanwhile, the cancellation reign-of-terror among the regime’s self-appointed guardians of Wokeness rages on. In the name of diversity and inclusion, no one in the USA is allowed to publicly question the Woke narrative of the moment, or else be deprived of your livelihood. The New York Times fired forty-year veteran science reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr., for using the freighted word “n*gg*r” while answering a student’s question about the history of the word’s usage, just as I am explaining his use of it in the incident at issue — that is, academically.

Though Mr. McNeil’s intent was incontrovertibly innocent as viewed by persons not insane — including, only briefly, the paper’s executive editor Dean Baquet — the decision to not sack Mr. McNeil provoked a reflexive uproar among the Times’s staff, as something in the wind might provoke a flight of grasshoppers transforming into a swarm of locusts, and Mr. Baquet reversed himself, forcing Mr. McNeil to choose demotion or resignation. Then, to make matters worse, the Times’s publisher, AG Sulzberger, spiked a column by nominally “conservative” op-ed writer Bret Stephens that attempted to argue some legalistic points about intent in the conduct of a witch hunt, an apparent affront to the Times’s witch-hunters, who seem to prefer their witch-hunting as a straight-up blood sport.

How strange it is to see the group formerly so avid for social and sexual transgression, and the artistic subversion of norms, turn into the most viciously censorious species of bluenose. But, of course, you must understand that Wokery is not about principle, not even a teeny-weeny bit. It’s simply about coercion and punishment, which is exactly why apologizing for supposed counter-Woke errors never avails. In other words, you are not dealing with a mere extreme type of moralist, but rather dedicated sadists. They’re not in it to correct injustice, but for the pleasures of vengeance alone, the torturing of their quarry, and the glow of power it confers.

And the motive is no different among the Democratic Party’s Wokesters in government. How else explain the idiotic impeachment of former president Trump, like the trial of the cadaver of Pope Formosus in the year 897, seven months after his death, for provoking the Carolingian Duke Arnolf to cross the Alps into Italy and seize the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. That episode took place in the heart of the Dark Ages, of course, but have we perhaps not entered a new Dark Age with the Woke Inquisition against — let’s just face it — Western Civ, and all its (for some) difficult-to-comprehend achievements?

Like the trial of Formosus, the trial of Mr. Trump is strictly in the service of laying out a story, a narrative, for validating the continued persecution of Woke heretics — that is, “insurrectionists,” indeed anyone not ardently on-board with transforming the USA into a Woke tyranny of race-and-gender hustling and the endless extortion of cash penalties for the crime of whiteness. What cat-turd box of Satan’s own law school are the leaders of this despotic hysteria hatched from: Pelosi, Swalwell, Adam Schiff, Schumer, and their accessories in media and tech, Jack, Zuck, Cook, and Bezos, and their numberless priests in higher ed? How much longer will it be before the substantial and obdurately not-insane of this country refuse to roll over for these rampaging maniacs?

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-trials-of-wokery/