Wokeness

Red Guards in Mexico?

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In Mexico, Rodrigo Iván Cortés, a former Congressman of that country, has been convicted of “political violence” for social media posts on gender, referring to Mexican Congressional representative as “man who self-ascribes as a woman”.  In addition to a fine, he has been sentenced to publish an apology (written by the court) on his social media accounts, daily for 30 days.  He was also was entered into the National Registry of Persons Sanctioned in Political Matters against Women.  A petition has been filed on his behalf with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.  See also this Twitter post.

Responding to a post from Claire Lehmann about her kids coming home from school and being required to write letters of apology for colonization and ‘wrecking the planet’, Greg Ashman remarked that this sort of thing was dismissed circa 2015 as just ‘fringe American campus politics’, but that but it inevitably came for Australian school rooms.

Indeed, Wokeness has spread around the world with amazing speed…and now, apparently, has gainedd a significant lodging in Mexico.  Yet how many people in that country..among the elites of that country..really believe the full party line about there being no real differences between men and women? Very few, I would hazard a guess.  Yet they seem quite happy to go along with the enforcement of those beliefs on their population.

Yet perhaps there is hope for a turnaround.  A Canadian nurse reports on Twitter:

I was seeing a therapist who said most of her clients have become professionals who are deeply unhappy with DEI & woke culture at work. They feel afraid of speaking up, but are sick of the constant barrage of racist, delusional nonsense they’re supposed to champion. It is making people miserable & fearful. It is making people leave careers, or get forced out for infractions. Organizations still clinging to DEI are making a terrible mistake.

There seem to be a lot of reactions like this developing. Things that might sound all right as catch-phrases often don’t seem so good when people see and feel them working out themselves in practice.  And much of the support for Wokeness seems to represent Preference Falsification, at some level…people not really being comfortable with those assertions, but going along with them because they believe that everyone else (in circles that matter to them) believes in the assertions.  And when cracks in the wall of apparent unanimity begin the appear, the Preference Cascade in the other direction can change things quickly.

Nightmare Numbers

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A poll conducted Dec 13-14 among 2000 registered voters included the question:

Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?

Among respondents aged 18-24, 67% believed that Jews as a class’ are oppressors.  Note well: the questions was not about ‘Israel’ or ‘Israelis’ or ‘Zionists’, it was about Jews, plain and simple.

Michelle Tandler responded: “This is extraordinary. How did Gen Z come to believe that Jews are oppressors? Is that being taught somewhere..?”

What is being taught, pretty clearly, is that people are primarily defined by their ethnic and gender identity…there are no individuals, there are only ‘communities’ defined by these demographic categories. The more successful groups are defined as oppressors of the less-successful groups. Even the behavioral attributes required for success are viewed pejoratively; see for example  the Smithsonian on ‘whiteness’.  If values such as ‘hard work’, ‘rational thinking’, and ‘future orientation’ are considered as ‘whiteness’, then Jews ‘as a class’ certainly exemplify that attribute, regardless of the shade of any particular individual’s skin.  And if whites as a class are oppressors, then Jews as a class must be meta-oppressors.

This kind of thing clearly had its origins in academia.  As John Ellis notes at the WSJ:  “Campus antisemitism grew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”..The radical left is the cause, most obviously through the one-party campuses having graduated an entire generation of young Americans indoctrinated with their ideas.”

Academia, and the K-12 schools which are repeaters of its ideologies, are of course not the only factors in this shocking rise in anti-Semitism. The rise of TikTok, with its emphasis on pre-literate modes of communication and the behavior of its algorithms–are they purposely malign toward American interests?–is surely a factor. See this comparison of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views among TikTok users and users of other platforms…see also this WSJ study of what actually shows up in the TikTok feeds of people registered as 13-year-olds.

Also–given that there are many nations–and not only Muslim ones–where anti-Semitism has been more pervasive and accepted than in the US, it is likely that the presence of large numbers of immigrants and foreign students has played a role in moving the Overton Window to a worse place: ‘Personnel is Policy.’

And, historically, societies in which people lose a sense of hope for the future, that they feel that they are facing pervasive decline, have been especially likely to be prone to anti-Semitism.  There are a lot of people in the US today who are not optimistic about either our national future or their personal futures.

While there are all these factors–and doubtless many more–behind the upsurge in anti-Semitism and the support for extreme groups such as Hamas, I believe that the ideology of Indentity Politics is the primary factor.  The prominent lawyer Alan Dershowitz went so far as to say DEI is the incubator of anti-Semitism.

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Weimar Germany, 1918-1933…and the USA in the Present Era

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Victor Davis Hanson has published an article titled Weimar America, which begins with the line:

Something eerie, something creepy, is happening in the world—and now in America as well. 

Hanson sees some very disturbing similarities between Weimar then and the USA now.  Definitely read the whole thing.

Recent events in the US, such as the level of sympathy for Hamas and the outbreaks of virulent anti-Semitism, seem to have taken many people (not including Hanson) by surprise. But this has been building for a long time.  Hanson’s article reminds me that in 2016, I wrote a post titled The United States of Weimar? and updated it a month later.  I’m republishing these posts here, following the page break.  Some of the links may not work anymore.

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