Richard Hanania, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, Broadside Books, 2023, 288 pp.
If you build it, they will come.
That’s the message of Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke. It’s not that power defeats ideology, but that power, as expressed through laws, regulations, and court decisions, can spawn ideology. It’s a message American conservatives won’t like, and it’s therefore something they need to hear.
The American Right loves to expose, explain, and deconstruct the ideological evolution of the progressives who have been defeating the Right for the last six decades. Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution is the latest example. Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West inspired campus radicals of my generation. The one time in my life I spoke to the late Andrew Breitbart, he credited William Lind’s views on Cultural Marxism as what most influenced his politics. Breitbart’s own maxim, “politics is downstream from culture,” is now a slogan for movement conservatives.
Top 6 books in “Cultural Policy” at Amazon are all Hanania and Rufo, and number 7 is something called “The War on Whites.” 😂
Feeling suddenly good about the future of the culture. https://t.co/gR96Z9WfX8 pic.twitter.com/I01465sBI7
— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) September 21, 2023
Richard Hanania tells us we’re wrong — and he’s probably right. He argues that critics of wokeness are blind to why these extreme beliefs have been all-conquering. “[W]hat I found strange about the anti-wokeness side of the debate was that its proponents seemed oblivious to the extent to which the beliefs and practices they disliked were mandated by law.” (vii) Dr. Hanania argues that Breitbart’s rule can promote political passivity, because “culture versus politics” is a false distinction, especially with a government that nearly dominates the economy.
The best part of this book for rightists should be its attention to concrete power politics and specific policies as laid down by courts and bureaucracies. Dr. Hanania cites James Burnham and notes that a managerial elite was inevitable but that “there was nothing inevitable about a portion of this class taking on social engineering as a career.” (67) The best leftist organizers, notably the notorious Saul Alinsky, would probably agree with him. Alinsky was famously dismissive of ideological purity, emphasizing appeals to interest while building coalitions. Politics is about power and transferring resources to your side, not about the ways policies express a political philosophy.
Dr. Hanania defines “three pillars” of wokeness: the belief that disparities can be explained only by discrimination, that speech must be restricted to overcome such disparities, and that a bureaucracy is necessary to “enforce correct thought and action.” The first two define whether a person or idea is woke, while the third shows how wokeness is enforced. Some may protest that this gives critical theory short shrift, but that’s the point. A historical perspective, he argues, “provides many reasons to doubt theories that blame any particular philosophy or religion for what has happened.” He instead emphasizes the “primacy of politics over ideology.” (9-10) “Long before wokeness was a cultural phenomenon, it was law,” he says, with the key to its success being its “hidden, indirect nature” because civil rights law “involves constantly nudging institutions in the direction of being obsessed with identity and suppressing speech, all while it speaks in the language of freedom and nondiscrimination.” (10) It’s deceptive and thus hard to combat.
Dr. Hanania cautions us not to indulge the conservative temptation to rage against the whole system, nor to believe the system was carefully constructed to be this effective. Instead, while legislators thought they were abolishing “a caste system in the South,” “politicians and government bureaucrats in institutions like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Department of Labor” got around the text of the law to achieve equality of outcome. The Supreme Court banned race quotas but blessed the concept of disparate impact, arguably the worst possible outcome because it was so vague. “Nothing is explicitly allowed, or prohibited,” Dr. Hanania says.
Republicans — notably when Richard Nixon expanded affirmative action to government contracts and President George H.W. Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991 — may have been worse than President Lyndon Johnson. Nixon gave protected categories (an ever-expanding group) special privileges, and the 1991 act expanded the scope of lawsuits and complaints of “discrimination” and “harassment,” and “disparate impact.” Republicans, even after the Republican Revolution, with the supposed conservative Newt Gingrich as Speaker, shied away from ending affirmative action when they had the chance. “Sometime in 1995,” Dr. Hanania says, “Republican leaders apparently concluded that winning the public relations battle over affirmative action was hopeless, and they stopped talking about the issue.” (168)
George W. Bush expanded the scope of disability cases even further, with the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 — and got an overwhelming bipartisan majority. In all of these cases, there was seemingly no thought about the long-term consequences of providing a rich market for activists and lawyers exploiting ethnic and other grievances, nor did “free-market” Republicans seem to consider the economic costs. Dr. Hanania argues that Republicans are growing more combative on these issues, even though “wokeness” is now a powerful force with well-funded activists and secure bases in academia and the media. The woke empire was created in a fit of absent-mindedness, at least at the highest levels.
“Diversity” — a value with almost religious importance in modern America — was the byproduct of Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s opinion in University of California v. Bakke (1978), which permitted universities to consider race, while banning quotas. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s dissent, which mocked banning quotas but allowing the same goal “through winks, nods, and disguises,” was more coherent and honest. (13) Dr. Hanania says that in the years after the decision, diversity went from almost unmentioned to a major concept discussed in the press and then the standard justification for race preferences. “We can see the invention of a concept in real time.” (13) Where did it come from? “It was basically the creation of one judge acting out of either political timidity or intellectual laziness.”
Violence also works. Citing Hugh Davis Graham and John Skrentny, Dr. Hanania argues that inner-city riots convinced Washington “to go beyond color-blindness and adopt policies like affirmative action and minority set-asides in order to buy social peace.” (14) Bureaucratic decisions from decades ago also “determined which groups were protected and which were not,” leading to such absurdities as the invention of “Hispanics” (which includes white Spaniards) and calling Arabs “white.”
Perhaps the saddest and yet most symbolic example of government fumbling is the reason why “sex discrimination” is such a force in American law and culture today: Rep. Howard Smith (D-VA) inserted it into the Civil Rights Act as part of an effort to kill the bill because he thought people would think it too absurd. Legislators didn’t understand what they were unleashing. The lesson is that if the law opens a space, power will fill it and come up with an ideology to justify it, and that ideology will be driven to its logical conclusion, no matter how ridiculous. Those who have the tightest focus on the issue and the most to gain — the bureaucrats who administer the new rules — have little reason to restrain themselves.
The government decides which categories are relevant to public life, and which are not. It then goes about encouraging a system of data collection and record keeping to justify state intervention and private activism. Law influences culture, as individuals are financially incentivized to lean into accepted identities and play their assigned roles, and may come to genuinely believe that the box they are put in has deep historical, moral, and spiritual importance. All of this happens far from the democratic process; civil rights laws as passed by Congress, incomplete and vague, serve as the justification for bureaucrats and judges to remake society. (92)
We take identity categories for granted so often that we often fail to reflect on their arbitrary nature. Some may laugh at the author’s hypothetical example of French and Italian Americans calling themselves “Romance Americans,” but that’s less absurd than Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) being lumped together and giving us campaigns such as “Stop AAPI Hate.”
Different ethnic groups can be joined together or split apart depending on the financial and political incentives, but the arbitrary nature of the process doesn’t prevent ethnic activists from taking it very seriously. Addressing the “Great Replacement,” Dr. Hanania says that “what neither side seems to have noticed is that the idea of the great replacement derives from government racial classifications and their downstream effect on culture.” (105) Thus, Arabs and Persians are “white” and therefore slow the Great Replacement. Some “Hispanics” are white, but — statistically — speed the Great Replacement. None of this makes the issue less divisive.
Is “white” as arbitrary and meaningless as “AAPI”? Many don’t think Middle Easterners are part of our race or civilization. White advocates would argue that “white” is not just a cultural but a biological category, and that the Founders wrote it into the 1790 Naturalization Act. But even if white identity were entirely arbitrary, The Origins of Woke shows that even small bureaucratic changes can produce sincere and emotional conceptions of group identity. If whites didn’t exist, the government could invent them — for purposes benign or malevolent. Dr. Hanania suggests that racial identities are likely to grow stronger with time.
Wokeness undermined representative government. What we call “civil rights” has little to do with what elected representatives thought they were voting for.
At various points throughout the debate over the Civil Rights Act, critics of the bill expressed concern that it might do x. In response, supporters of the bill would say, “no, it won’t do x,” and the two sides would agree to a compromise that involved entering a clause into the bill in effect saying that “x is prohibited.” Usually within a decade, the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] and the federal courts would do x anyway. (39)
Wokeness leads to tyranny. Dr. Hanania explains that with the concept of disparate impact, “basically everything is illegal and the government will decide which violations it goes after.” This just doesn’t invite corruption; it practically defines it.
Finally, wokeness makes us cowards. “Businesses must display ‘EEO Is the Law’ posters, which tell the world that an employer both practices affirmative action and does not discriminate based on race,” says Dr. Hanania. “Citizens are thus socialized to engage in doublethink, not question official dogma on sensitive issues, and walk on eggshells when faced with the demands of noisy activists within institutions, no matter how unreasonable they might be.” (22)
Dr. Hanania emphasizes that he is not attempting to track every way “wokeness as law” affects our lives, but for newcomers, he will seem exhaustive. A table provides the key doctrines (affirmative action, disparate impact in the private sector, disparate impact in government funding, anti-harassment law, and anti-harassment in women’s sports), the legal basis, what it does, the way it is enforced, and its effects. Another table shows what can be done to roll back some of these destructive policies. These tables are a greater accomplishment than entire books about the philosophical problems with liberal doctrines on race. Dr. Hanania’s detailed histories of the regulations, executive orders, court decisions, and laws (which are arguably the least important in determining what really happens) are invaluable.
Dr. Hanania’s thesis isn’t totally comprehensive. If we accept that seemingly minor battles birthed the swelling cancer of wokeness, we must still contend with its larger triumph throughout the entire Western world, especially the Anglosphere. The United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada are worse than America when it comes to meddling in social relations for the benefit of non-whites, and there seems to be less resistance to white shaming. The rest of Europe — certainly anything coming out of Brussels — isn’t much better.
Dr. Hanania notes that wokeness in France may even be stronger than in the United States because of hate speech laws, but there is more resistance to le wokisme (considered an American cultural invasion) in elite circles and arguably less regulation of everyday speech. However, wokeness is still advancing in France alongside demographic transformation, as well as in Germany, the Netherlands, and the rest of Europe. Dr. Hanania praises France for not collecting data on race or forcing companies to do so, but while this might pose an obstacle to “wokeness,” it hasn’t reversed or stopped demographic transformation or anti-white policies. We can accept that cultural change is downstream from politics, but everything is downstream from demography. Surging numbers of non-whites will lead to politicians willing to use race-based programs to win their support and electorally overwhelm whites. Why demographic change is occurring, who is behind it, and what they hope to gain are important questions.
Dr. Hanania frankly admits that his book is directed towards Republicans because Democrats refuse to talk about these questions. “While Americans debate taxes and foreign policy, culture and identity issues appear to be what is truly motivating many of the nation’s most prominent activists, media figures, and political leaders on both sides, along with the mass of their voters,” he says. (1)
Wokeness isn’t just a reflection of institutional incentives, although one could argue that ideology tends to follow interests. Mr. Rufo’s book may have focused on ideology, and such a history is needed to explain why activists were willing to use such aggressive tactics to get Ethnic Studies departments and other programs established even before the “woke” revolution really took off. The two books are often compared, and it’s probably better to read Mr. Rufo’s book first to learn how the movement first arose, while Dr. Hanania explains how it established itself within our system.
Dr. Hanania’s argument is that there is a solution to these problems within the system, but it requires action from people who can actually get elected, make policy, and appoint judges and staffers. This may happen because fewer Republicans care about being called racist. They can even fight “wokeness” by working with the original language and intent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (Dr. Hanania thinks repealing it is politically unrealistic.) Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign — which looked more promising when this book was written — could be a herald, with his boast that the Sunshine State is the place where “woke goes to die” and his successful fights against DEI and ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) policies. Leading candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wrote a blurb for The Origins of Woke.
Dr. Hanania’s acceptance of political tribalism might be surprising to his Substack readers and his X followers. He is openly contemptuous of the downward mobility of the Republican base, the antics of anti-vaccine activists, and of Republicans who support Donald Trump because they want to be entertained. He has also written about the ways diversity really is a strength and sees no contradiction between accepting the reality of racial differences in IQ and wanting more immigration. He is what we might call a cognitive supremacist, who wants a meritocracy of the intelligent, market access to elite human capital (and therefore relatively loose immigration), and few drags on productivity and efficiency in the interests of equity (to please leftists) or of tradition and ethnic solidarity (to please rightists). Of course, he’s not saying political tribalism is good — it’s just the way it is now, and people who want to change policy must accept it.
We may think Dr. Hanania is wrong about some things. In fact, he’s wrong about a lot of things. However, someone who accepts the reality of the racial achievement gaps isn’t obligated to embrace white identity politics, let alone become a zealot. In turn, we are under no obligation to abandon our views because we agree with much of his thesis. What he wants for “wokeness” is what we want, and his criticism sharpens our thinking.
It may even be argued that only someone like him could write this book. If the price is simply a few sneers at white working-class voters or at the far-right, that’s a small price to pay for progress. When it comes to racial politics on the American Right, those who can do something won’t, and those who would do something, can’t. Someone who really understands the importance of these issues may become a public race realist or white advocate — which means forfeiting any chance of political, bureaucratic, or judicial office. In contrast, Republicans who are in positions of power are naïve or cowardly, desperately avoiding controversy, accepting leftist rhetoric at face value, and almost apologizing for their position. That is Dr. Hanania’s story. Dedicated left-wing judges, bureaucrats, and activists take any opportunity to expand their power and shift the culture. Republicans dreamily go along with it, thinking that they are being nice or, more likely, not thinking at all. I’d prefer that people who despise me but understand this issue be in power rather than people who pay lip service to our issues but are easily rolled.
But even if it is politically advantageous, will Republicans act? It requires a great deal of public pressure on a conservative to make him do the right thing, and changes to regulations and executive orders require dedication and detailed knowledge because the bureaucracy can’t be trusted. Conservative judges have already been a disappointment. “In contrast to disparate impact, affirmative action in college admissions has been in conservatives’ crosshairs for decades, and by the time this book is released, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard may have already been decided,” Dr. Hanania says. (198) It has, and the conservatives did the same thing Dr. Hanania bemoans throughout the book: outlawed racial discrimination, while leaving loopholes that will let colleges keep discriminating by fiddling with racial identity statements and downplaying objective criteria for admission. Outright quotas would be more honest and therefore better.
Dr. Hanania’s assumption that anything can be done has therefore already taken a major hit; the conservative legal movement has already blown a priceless opportunity. Bureaucrats, activists, and institutions must be given no loopholes. The Origins of Woke amply shows why we can’t trust in their good faith or reasonableness.
Stopping highly motivated small groups who get large subsidies extracted from an easily distracted and ignorant population is a big problem for a democracy, even if it’s racially homogenous. Race makes things worse. Many non-whites think they are fighting a holy crusade against “racism” while whites, at best, are making a vague stand for individualism. An overall collapse in living standards doesn’t mean there will automatically be a successful reaction — Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and South Africa are proof of that. Sometimes things just fall apart and stay that way. Wokeness could grow to the point that it chokes the whole economy. Dr. Hanania himself once suggested a “strongman” might be a way out of the mess because “liberals always win,” but this also has costs and we don’t have a strongman. Dr. Hanania now emphasizes his support for liberal democracy and insists the system offers a path to victory for conservatives, who, he argues, actually have been winning on guns, homeschooling, and other issues.
“Wokeness” may be different. The question is whether conservatives really want to win on this issue, at least enough to withstand furious opposition from a campaign to roll back so-called “civil rights.” Gun owners and homeschoolers are more committed than the average person who wants to ban guns or homeschooling. With wokeness, it’s the reverse. The fight against it is a struggle for free speech, freedom of association, economic freedom, and the marketplace of ideas. Unfortunately, the media will never frame it that way and those who benefit from it will never surrender. White advocates have yet to find conservative leaders with the will to carry out policy changes. Defeating identity politics may require a countervailing movement of white identity politics.
Such a solution is unlikely to satisfy Dr. Hanania and he probably thinks it’s extreme and unnecessary. I hope he’s right and I’m wrong. The Origins of Woke may be best seen as a guide not to white advocates or even conservatives, but to liberals. It is an off-ramp for moderates who want to consolidate the civil rights revolution while reigning in wokeness before it generates a backlash in which white identitarians claim power. Rather than trying to cancel Dr. Hanania, they’d be wise to take his advice. If they don’t, we can take The Origins of Woke as a guide for where to begin, but certainly not where to end.
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Why demographic change is occurring, who is behind it, and what they hope to gain are important questions.
Stop asking questions about my people!
Richard Hanania is a Palestinian, the same group who always oppress and discriminate against Jews in Israel.
It begs the question (and I mean “begs” in its proper sense) to say wokeness won because it gained the positions and tools of practical power. Well, how and why did wokeness gain those positions and tools to begin with? The books’ analysis seems to be tendentious and circular and conclusory because it doesn’t get to the bottom of it. This is like asking why did the cheetah catch the antelope, and then saying, that’s easy – – the Cheetah had the speed advantage. A proper answer would explain that the cheetah has a highly flexible spine, which allows for a greater leg extension; and a small head which confers an advantage in that…and so on. In sum, you need what I will call, following my metaphor, “True Cheetah knowledge.”
I was present exactly where and when wokeness took hold: A super-“elite” New England university, late 6os. I have True Cheetah Knowledge. To write a proper book about this, an author would need to interview ancient people like me (but smarter at this) who have True Cheetah Knowledge.
This is stupid. This guy doesn’t understand that the powers that be support both sides of woke. They don’t care which side you’re on. Just as long as you fight against woke–or for woke–or about woke–or over woke–instead of asking where all the money went. Because the only thing that matters is money. And as long as you bitch and moan and analyze the shit out of anything else other than money, you are doing the job they have assigned to you. Suckers.
This bears repeating. Quite a number of people here in the comments insist that we let it all burn down, because that’s the only way we can recover and rebuild. But there’s no guarantee that any conflagration won’t be used as an excuse for even greater repression.
Quite the contrary: recent experience indicates that people should be very careful what they wish for. Underneath the frying pan there is often fire.
No, the fake progs defeated the Left even more.
Just ask a true leftist like Norman Finkekstein. Or Jeremy Corbyn.
The hallmarks of the right — wealth, hierarchy, authority, obedience, militarism, supremacism, elitism, etc — are still intact and, if anything, bigger than ever.
Jews, blacks, and homos are favored not for equality sake but supremacist sake.
Just ask the Palestinians.
What happened is that ultra-right Jews have been faking as ‘progressives’ to conceal the tribalist supremacism that animates them.
This, in a nutshell, is the Kabuki I keep discussing.
Both sides are playing a game, but with one goal in mind: jew rule and the demise of white people (Amalek). No matter which jewish “side” wins, in the end, they unite and we are broken.
We should unite the same because we are much bigger, but we have allowed them to infiltrate and corrupt the allegiances we once had as a white race. It has taken centuries to accomplish. But it is not too late to turn back.
Civil action cases did eternally warp our workplaces, and thus economic mobility and access to education, and initiated the death by a thousand cuts of free speech values and our middle classes.
Working and lower classes are decimated by illegal immigration.
Mass legal immigration, empowered by identity politics benefiting even elite groups, has deeply affected the professional, academic, and STEM fields. Exceedingly elite populations fleeing the conditions they profited from in their home countries occupy ever-larger portions of opportunity paths for ambitious American born students. Foreign student excess fees collected by universities from the world’s top .001% do far more to shove native-born Americans out of medicine and the professions than affirmative action ever did.
But the linchpin of nation-destroying is hate crime laws. 1997 was the year equal justice died. Clinton, Holder, and Kagan ushered in a regime that destroyed equality before the law in criminal law enforcement, thus destroying fifty years of efforts to do the opposite. Justice and crime control were forever politicized and replaced with identity politics. Institutional capture accomplished by the hate crimes industry across a broad swath of federal agencies, but especially the DOJ and DOE, resulted in bureaucratic advancement only for enforcers of the hate crimes regime. Our speech laws are no safer than France’s thanks to the broad interpretation of these laws. Their extralegal shadow policies warp education and civil society.
Creating a cynical caste system in criminal prosecutions has done more to inflame hatreds and exacerbate lawlessness than any other law passed in the last fifty years. Hate crime laws have utterly broken every social contract while supercharging other destructive trends in immigration, gender disorder, race relations, and media corruption.
Ironically, heterosexual, white, female (real ones) victims of crimes targeting women are quietly, systematically, and extra-legally excluded from hate crime law . These laws de facto make such female victims lesser citizens than gays , transgenders, and any minority. Minority victims violated by members of their own communities similarly experience lesser status before the law. Opposing the hate crime industry could be a way to strengthen common bonds between women and white men and crime victims across races. But it is taboo to discuss any effort to repeal these bloody, tribal laws.
DC supplies tyranny because Americans demand tyranny. The DC regime is comically weak and can’t even oppress the Amish if they don’t want to be oppressed. Like, bro, just don’t take the vaccine. Reality: over 90% of Americans took the vaccine.
Your problem isn’t that it’s “bad” its that, “Mommy, I wanted to do it!” You want a turn holding the whip. You don’t get it because your tyranny is less agonizing and thus in lower demand, that’s all.
These are the sort of “laws” that require a good level of insane (to the level of abrahamic “religions”) Belief.
Belief and Fear. The anti-knowledge formula.
And the sort of person that gives them a single thought, well, they need to maintain an extreme level of “social distancing” from my person. And please keep the mask on so we can identify you.
Machiavelli explained the principle of wokeism in 1513, “One of the great secrets of the day is to know how to take possession of popular prejudices and passions, in such a way as to introduce a confusion of principles which makes impossible all understanding between those who speak the same language and have the same interests.”
Special interests know that by making the moral purity tests of cancel culture appear legitimate, they can employ them to silence those who might expose the structures of corporate power. The bullying used by social media platforms, which are integrated into the state security and surveillance apparatus, is used to silence all dissent. Campaigns of moral absolutism widen the gap between the liberal elites and the white working class, because this division is crucial to maintaining the power of the elites, distracting us from their far more egregious abuses of power. Boutique activism converts ordinary people into partners in advancing those interests, in a dangerous new form of psychologically manipulative narrative control.
I think this is related too. In a 2013 speech, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping identified a significant reason why the USSR dissolved: “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party fall from power? An important reason was that the struggle in the field of ideology was extremely intense, completely negating the history of the Soviet Union, negating the history of the Soviet Communist Party, negating Lenin, negating Stalin, creating historical nihilism and confused thinking. Party organs at all levels had lost their functions, the military was no longer under Party leadership. In the end, the Soviet Communist Party, a great party, was scattered, the Soviet Union, a great socialist country, disintegrated. This is a cautionary tale!”
Women’s suffrage was the beginning of the end.
Good reasoning, but then there it comes, the usual statement like: ‘ it is not too late to turn back’.
How do you know? Is there any measure that supports this claim?
All I see is the wall we are running into, I don’t see remotely capable brakes or any realistic steering action that could avert it. Those optimistic ‘it’s not too late, we just need to …’ seems like nothing more than pure wishful thinking to me. Apart from the usual shared responsibility without concrete action implicit in that ‘we just need to’.
I guess this is the origin of the ‘let it crash’ mentality. At least after the crash the chaos may be large enough to be able to undertake something useful. At the moment, the control of all sides is simply staggering, even the very aware often forget the actual situation we’re in …
What’s your “True Jew Knowledge,” then? Say it: Jew usurers control the global money supply and their first target for elimination via dilution and mental subversion is people of Nordic/Saxon descent, who constitute the greatest threat to their existence and their ability to dictate everything to the goylem for the remainder of human history.
Not sure what your point is, and how it reacts to what I said. Maybe you should try to describe what the relevance is for the black-pilled position.
I do recognize that mentailty, but it’s not the point I’m making, so I don’t see how it’s relevant to the point I brought up.
The standard format of the Trolley Problem poses a dilemma between contrasting negative outcomes, arranged on diverging trolley tracks, the selection between which outcomes the person at the switching box has control. Usually the purpose of the thought experiment is to question whether the person at the switching box is morally obligated to select one negative outcome over the other, and to act in order that the outcome will come to pass. My image alters the parameters of the Trolley Problem to more accurately depict the situation experienced by a reality-aware person in our current world. There is only one track, everyone is on the track, there is no switch, and the man witnessing the catastrophe has realized that there is no solution, perhaps at long-last, after warning the bound victims beforehand of the dangers of tying themselves to the trolley track.
The sole witness is in a similar position to yourself, when you say:
though perhaps his emotional reaction of “smug satisfaction” isn’t equivalent to your despair. The image is a fatalistic joke.
Republicans “may” have been worse?
turning the niggers loose on us: Lincoln (Rep.)
school “integration”: Ike (Rep.)
“affirmative action”: Dick Nix and Sandra O’Con, (Reps.)
“Hate Crime” laws: Gingrich (Rep.)
somewhere here, there’s a pattern.
Power is Power, EoT. End of Transmission.
Republicans’ main contributions to the race discourse have been to help banish race realism from polite discourse and to constantly talk about how Democrats are the real racists who allegedly keep black people on the Democrat plantation!
“One of the great secrets of the day is to know how to take possession of popular prejudices and passions, in such a way as to introduce a confusion of principles which makes impossible all understanding between those who speak the same language and have the same interests.”
The Not-so-Divine Machiavelli. It’s very true though.
“One of the great secrets of the day is to know how to take possession of popular prejudices and passions, in such a way as to introduce a confusion of principles which makes impossible all understanding between those who speak the same language and have the same interests.”–The Prince.
Someone above nailed it with that quote.
Gregory Hood: “Perhaps the saddest and yet most symbolic example of government fumbling is the reason why “sex discrimination” is such a force in American law and culture today: Rep. Howard Smith (D-VA) inserted it into the Civil Rights Act as part of an effort to kill the bill because he thought people would think it too absurd. Legislators didn’t understand what they were unleashing.”
Too bad Hood didn’t check his sources. In support of this point, in The Origins of Woke Hanania cites as his source for this story a law review article by legal scholar Michael Evan Gold entitled “A Tale of Two Amendments: The Reasons Congress Added Sex to Title VII and Their Implication for the Issue of Comparable Worth.” But it’s clear that Hanania either didn’t read the article, or, if he did read it, didn’t understand it.
In fact, Gold’s article clearly states the opposite in its opening paragraphs:
Hanania’s scholarship doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. He has misstated a very simple point to make it better accord with his thesis that the legislators didn’t really know what they were doing. It turns out that, in Gold’s opinion at least, they knew exactly what they were doing.
Gold goes on to state:
Yes, the implication being: blacks are perpetual underachievers because they’re maimed by Democrats’ “soft bigotry of low expectations.” (Put the blame on maim.) Whereas Republicans want to let them swim to glory on the currents of market forces. Er, well, market forces plus taxpayer money for midnight basketball programs to keep them off the streets.
Still believe that politics is downstream from culture, and that the invasion and takeover of Academia was the start. That is what makes sense.
This is key – conservatives don’t get this. Power seeks ideological justification for itself. You don’t argue your way to power with superior debate skills or a cohesive ideology. You seize power and then worry about making it seem to align with an heroic narrative of right, justice, and the American Way. Conservatives were like Cassandra for several decades – they made arguments that correctly predicted a future which their political opposition swore would never happen and which was generally politically unpopular, and then when that future came they’re jeered at for having ever opposed it. In this way, being right is not just useless, but demoralizing. Coincidentally, the acceptable conservative ideology holds that politics is to be engaged sort of ironically – you win an election and then instead of rewarding your supporters and punishing your enemies you do the reverse to show that you’re really a good guy. (The Left never, ever does this ironic form of politics).
The American Way in particular becomes whatever set of stories the powerful tell about themselves. That’s how diversity became our strength, and how it became treason to question it – not because Madison and Jefferson baked it into the nascent nation between the lines of the Constitution, but because people seized power and distributed resources to their political coalition which was itself made up of fringe racial, ethnic, sexual, and religious constituencies – there had to be a better story than “we robbed you to give stuff to our weird group of friends.” “Diversity” means that their coalition members get the lion’s share of everything whether they win or they lose elections – they just get more and get it faster when they win.
Diversity was Austria-Hungary’s strength as well, right up until Charles I was forced into exile and the Empire was devolved int0 a dozen or so discrete nations because it was not cohesive enough to withstand a protracted modern War. This lesson is no doubt one which our ruling regime has forgotten, or more likely never learned in the first place.
The thing about the academy is that it is quite resilient to culture. That’s why there have been far left wingers at, say, the public University of Mississippi for decades in spite of it being a creature of one of the most conservative States in the Union in terms of its politics. Otherwise you’d expect Ole Miss to have a burgeoning Department of Confederacy Studies and so forth.
Conservatives are a joke. Abortion? WGAF? Why should I care if a nog gets aborted?? Conservatives believe tax cuts and school vouchers will turn blacks into brain surgeons and rocket scientists. The root cause of all of our problems was the elimination of freedom of association with the civil rights act in the 1960s. Restore that right, and things would change overnight. THAT is where the focus should be. I should be able to live among, employ, donate to, rent-to, buy from and sell to people I choose based on whatever criteria I choose.
Video Link
You say that as if it’s a bad thing.
This is about the genocidal ideology known as Marxism.
Wokeness, race, ethnicity, sex, class, whatever, is just bullshit.
True dat.
But time to look beyond Jew.
Hood wrote:
Factoid about Powell:
somebody explain to me one more time how ALL WHITE people share an identity and should operate as a group.
Gregory Hood wrote:
[Emphasis mine, Loup-Bouc.]
Ruth Bader Ginsberg was not a Supreme Court Justice in 1978, when (as Mr. Hood noted) Regents of Univ. of California v. Bakke was decided. Ginsberg rose to the Supreme Court bench on 10 August 1993.
Justice Stevens wrote an opinion that concurred with part of the Court’s judgment and dissented “in part.” Chief Justice Burger, and Justices Stewart, and Rehnquist concurred with Justice Stevens’s partial dissent. But Justice Stevens’s opinion did not mock mocked banning quotas but allowing the same goal “through winks, nods, and disguises.” Nor did any other opinion do so. And no other opinion was a dissent — partial or full.
The language “through winks, nods, and disguises” does not appear in Justice Stevens’s opinion or anywhere else in the case. The term “winks” does not appear anywhere; nor does the term “nods” or the term “disguises.”
The infinitive “to disguise” appears in in a footnote of Justice Powell’s Opinion of the Court (not a dissent or partial dissent). But the infinitive “to disguise” does not equal or parallel the nominative plural “disguises. And the infinitive “to disguise” occurs in a context unrelated to anything like an argument that banning express quotas is silly if a quota-effect is achievable by deception. The Powell opinion’s footnote 14 is this:
….. Politics is about power and transferring resources to your side, not about the ways policies express a political philosophy.
Dr. Hanania defines “three pillars” of wokeness: the belief that disparities can be explained only by discrimination, that speech must be restricted to overcome such disparities, and that a bureaucracy is necessary to “enforce correct thought and action…………
The 2 most powerful sentences in a compelling article.
“I saw a huge steam roller,
It blotted out the sun.
The people all lay down, lay down;
They did not try to run.
My love and I, we looked amazed
Upon the gory mystery.
“Lie down, lie down!” the people cried.
“The great machine is History!”
My love and I, we ran away,
The engine did not find us.
We ran up to a mountain top,
Left History far behind us.
Perhaps we should have stayed and died,
But somehow we don’t think so.
We went to see where History’d been,
And my, the dead did stink so. ”
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr
A succinct analysis of our current situation.
Universities: hey, where did the money go.
Hospitals: hey, where idd the money go.
Banks: hey, where did the money go.
Illegals: hey, where did the money go.
And so forth. Take a look at every public contract, and follow the money. Revelational, I would imagine.
In other words, he’s a snob.
In other words, he’s a shill for Pfizer and Moderna.
He’s a Jew or a tool for them.
Yeah, an “IQ supremacist”. That’s why ISteve likes him so much too. A civic nationalist, too, I guess.
I have no respect for people like Hanania. They are worse than useless, they are part of the problem.
There’s an old saying that applies here, “If I’m going down I’m going down swinging.” My genetic disposition leans this way.
So, what do science and mathematics say about ‘diversity is strength’?
They say nope.
Diversity in systems has two aspects: (1) the number of different components in the system and (2) the degree of interaction between those different components.
A) Systems with (1) many different components that (2) interact strongly are inherently unstable and the transition from stability to instability becomes sharper as diversity increases.
B) Systems with (1) many different components that (2) reduce uniformity of interaction strength by making blocks inside the system persist longer before they reach their transition to instability.
Result A) means that higher diversity in social systems means higher chance of instabilities and this is the reason I am predicting that civil warfare and ethnic cleansing will be the outcome of current policies on immigration and diversity in the Western world.
Result B) means that higher diversity in social systems where the diverse parts are separated into blocks (i.e. neighbourhoods with concentrations of types of immigrants, businesses that are monopolized by ethnic constitution) will take longer to reach the critical point of collapse. This also means that efforts to integrate the migrants are wrongheaded, they will accelerate the coming of the collapse by increasing the interaction strength between different ethnic groups.
Left-oriented and dominated organizations are bankrolled by the the ruling powers in society. These same powers use lawfare to suppress right-wing organizations and to prosecute (or hold in detention without trial) right-wing activists.
The people with money support the Left, and that’s the way the Leftists like it. “The Bourgeois” has never referred to Freemasonry, Judaism, and international finance. “The Bourgeois” refers to your Christian neighbors with a home and children.
So this didn’t apply to Virginia, of course, but to “every country.” You’ll understand the Left, the Communists, when you understand when men like Thomas Jefferson say these things, it’s just the typical sentiment of a Yankee.
Were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is. I have expressed to you my sentiments, because they are really those of 99. in an hundred of our citizens.
This is why Justice Powell could speak of Dresden as a good thing. And they would say the same thing about those of us in this country they wish to murder now and then. Now it is the “racists” and then it was “Tories.”
Even so, Independence was necessary. Unfortunately, it was hijacked from the beginning by subversive forces and party bosses like Thomas Jefferson.
For those wanting to know more about the author of the book (Richard Hanania), have a look at this interview with Tom Woods conducted in recent days:
Video Link
I’m curious, do people in Asia, Arabia, Africa, and parts of Central and South America sit around discussing ways to empower Europeans- White Americans? No, of course not. Which begs the question, who started this bullshit game of self destruction in the White world? If you control the levers of finance then you control a nation. None of us voted for these things, they were imposed on us. Throw feminism, drugs, lowering of standards in the mass media and gender bending chemicals into the mix and we have the nightmare that we are witnessing. Who is to blame? I think we know. Diversity is our strength? Really? You don’t get out much do you? A thousand years from now people may ask, what happened to the United States and Europe? Its simple really, we destroyed ourselves by letting usurpers take over our money and government.
It is.
And culture is downstream from race.
I like to put it a simpler way. Win first, figure out what to do later. When Gen. MacArthur said, there is no substitute for victory, what he meant, as he himself explained is that victory gives you the options and allow you to shape the peace. Without victory, the options belong to someone else and you are left the object of someone else’s decision making.
An interesting article, especially the three pillars of “wokeness” and the manipulation of “laws” to justify destructive and biased behaviour. But any course of actions has to start with identifying who is actually behind this “woke” attack, “liberal” or “progressive” is useless. At least we should start with specifics like ADL, SPLC and ACLU, all 100% controlled by real culprit, organized Jewry.
Looks like we have a new professional idiot for the right wing. Hopefully everyone has read The Age of Entitlement by Chris Caldwell if you have this book is superfluous at best. Someone could have worked backwards from 1965 and studied the activist lawfare organizations of the early 20th that led us to the civil rights era.
As always there is too much overthinking here, it is the jews, they occupy all the positions of power. Other elaborate theories are usually created because people are afraid of mentioning the jew.
You have a choice which label do you want to be known as a racist or a coward.
“A historical perspective, he argues, “provides many reasons to doubt theories that blame any particular philosophy or religion for what has happened.” Hanania’s book and this sympathetic review in Unz is typical CIA Zionist distraction social engineering; sure don’t blame any particular dual citizen ethic group or tribe for the woke transformation of the USA. Blame a law book. Oy vey!
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not on the Supreme Court in 1978! Yes I know someone else already said that, how about fixing it in the article?
The Hate Crime laws have had a Disparate Impact on Whites.
Don’t tell me that White Americans don’t suffer from anti-white brutality at the hands of niggers.
Richard Hanania is a Palestinian but not a Muslim. Like the late Edward Said and Hanan Asharavi he is a Christian. The Muslims for some reason do not measure up to Jews and I don’t why that is but perhaps it has something to do with secular education involving both science and math. Even among Israeli Jews, the secular ones are the smarter ones than the religious ones. If Palestinians were World’s leading doctors, engineers and scientists no one would dare oppress them but so long as they remain closely tied to the 7th century Arabia, I feel there won’t be any liberation.
Now do Jerome Powell.
Reigning in wokeness (in article)?
Wouldn’t that be raining in? That way, at least the flowers could grow …
I GUESS this is sarc.
The so called woke movement is another communist/zionist/satanic front for the destruction of America.
Zionists/communists/satanists are destroyers of nations and humanity.
It’s not just that his argument is circular, but that his core argument is a contradiction of his thesis. Hanania claims that wokeness is just civil rights law. He then goes on to point out that the authors of the civil rights bills had no intention of instituting programs like affirmative action or establishing legal doctrines like the disparate impact standard—an obvious Pandora’s Box. And in fact, in order to appease skeptics, the bill authors explicitly prohibited those actions. And yet only a few years after its passage, bureaucrats and the courts were interpreting the law in precisely that way. As Hanania says, they were not following the law at all, but twisting it to be what they wanted.
So it is not simply that wokeness was the law before it was the culture. His actual argument is that personnel is policy, and that conservatives should be paying more attention to the minutia of government regulations/guidances than to the utterances of the CEO of Coke-Cola. Which is fair enough. Obviously, conservatives are terrible at using power to advance their cultural interests. But if that is case, then it means the phenomenon of wokeness is not some unhappy quirk produced by ill-conceived laws, but always was a conscious (if not always far-sighted) ideological policy. In other words, the idea did come before the policy. Of course, like any ideology it aims for political power, and in order to attain and then retain that power it offer various carrots and sticks, but at the bottom, it is a battle of ideas. Every political question is.
Hania is a judeophile.
Maybe being an Israeli op gave him a nudge.
Isn’t Breitbart like Gateway Pundit like Shapiro like Levin like Prager like
any number of Horowitzes infiltrating to protect Israel, Jewry, holotiresome?
For what it’s worth, Hanania’s talking about Protestantism there, not the Jews.
The origins of “woke” trace back to the protestant reformation. That is when a myriad of protestant sects sprung forth preaching a utopia on earth and communism. Marxism was the first secularized christian sect where god is replaced with the government (remember Marx was financed by a christian communist group called the “League of the Just”). From there you can go to the “Social gospel” in the early 1900’s, Frankfurt School, 60’s counter-culture movement (christcuck.org)
How it got this bad ? Puh-lease… During the Great Judaic Revolution in Russia they (you know who) shot hostages in batches of 100 to the tune of >200K. And it was just a warm-up before mass extermination of Goyim Slavs.
“We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror”
— Martin Latsis, Red Terror
Scan of the article in Russian:
Back then it was evil bourgeoisie, now it is evil ray-cisss suprema-ciss YT MAGA dudes. Back then it was for the benefit of the oppressed worker. Now it is for the benefit of oppressed Negro. Script is the same.
Google “Red Terror” and look at/read about the REAL Holocaust
Woke is a Jew scam. It is all there if you think it through
Richard Hanania, Chris Rufo and Alex Nowrasteh are clear and present THREATS to the safety, security and sovereignty of the Historic American Nation.
Richard Hanania, Chris Rufo and Alex Nowrasteh all push nation-wrecking mass legal immigration, mass illegal immigration, REFUGEE OVERLOAD and ASYLUM SEEKER INUNDATION.
Richard Hanania, Chris Rufo and Alex Nowrasteh are enemies of the European Christian ancestral core of the United States of America.
Rancid scumbag Alex Nowrasteh and the Koch-funded Cato Institute are LIARS and TREASONITES.
Alex Nowrasteh is a bought and paid for whore of the CHEAP LABOR FACTION and the REAL ESTATE MONEY-GRUBBERS. Nowrasteh pushes open borders mass immigration.
White Core Americans Must Disregard The Evil Rat Liar Chris Rufo.
Chris Rufo’s latest bit of vile crud is to kick the dead corpse of Sam Francis. This little piece of shit Chris Rufo isn’t fit to hold Sam Francis’s ham sandwich, let alone make snide erroneous fraudulent comments about Mr Sam Francis.
Attention Chris Rufo:
PHUCK YOU, YOU FILTHY RANCID LIAR RAT MASS IMMIGRATION FANATIC!
Richard Hanania is a bought and paid for whore for the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire and Richard Hanania pushes open borders mass immigration.
Evil rat billionaire plutocrat oligarchs own and control Richard Hanania. Richard Hanania has no connection to the historic American nation and he revels in his ability to use the plutocrat-controlled mass media to push nation-killing open borders mass immigration, multicultural mayhem and all other manner of anti-White crud.
IMMIGRATION MORATORIUM NOW
DEPORT ALL ILLEGAL ALIEN INVADERS NOW
HANANIA, NOWRASTEH and RUFO PUSH NATION-KILLING MASS IMMIGRATION
It’s irritating how people like Hanania will not acknowledge that they are here and in privileged positions because of ‘wokeness’. Frankly I am not interested as ultimately whatever he has to say will be against my interests.
Well tell us your story, at least the brief version.
How It Got This Bad
I say:
It got this bad because the Baby Boomers and White Slobs born before 1965 were bought off with a series of asset bubbles inflated by the privately-controlled Federal Reserve Bank.
Founding Father Populists(FFP) must always look to demography and debt when politically framing the big questions. Always blame the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire for everything of an unpleasant nature, including tripping on cement slab sidewalks suffering severe upheaval.
RULING CLASS — DEBT — DEMOGRAPHY
Debt is monetary policy; Demography is mass immigration and anti-White government policies.
Monetary policy that benefits the billionaires and the top ten percent loot holders and mass immigration that destroys cultural cohesion and national sovereignty — or debt and demography — is the logic of the 21st century and a further elaboration helps explain why the White people in various European Christian nations stood by and did nothing while their nations were flooded out with foreigners.
The globalized central banks are involved in the greatest inter-generational ripoff scam of all time. That is why we had negative interest rates and zero interest rates and Quarter Volcker federal funds rate — 5% — and asset purchases and quantitative easing and money printing and all the rest. Debt created and sustained by the monetary policy extremism of central banks has been used to buy off the greedy White dolts born before 1965. Mass immigration is only tolerated because of the greedy White scum who are bought off by the machinations of the globalized central banks.
The greedy White scum born before 1965 will deserve the curses of those who come after. They stood by and did nothing while their nations were turned into Third World hellholes.
My connection of monetary policy and immigration policy still stands as one of the most sophisticated political conceptual works of the last 60 years. Simple it is. The JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire used monetary policy to buy off the greedy White slobs born before 1965 so those greedy White slobs would keep their mouths shut about the nation-wrecking effects of mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration. The multiple series of asset bubbles inflated by the privately-controlled Federal Reserve Bank bought off the greedy White slobs born before 1965 and that is why the nation-wrecking mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration wasn’t stopped sooner.
The ‘woke’ idea is genius. Its built on the pretext that one can’t say anything about jews. And because ‘woke’ is wholly jewish, one can’t say anything about ‘woke’. Circular argument, I admit, but you get the point! Lets just hope that the C19 ‘vaccine’ kicks in and sees off all those useless fucking socialists and liberal wokist into zombies soon. Like, very soon! Like sometime in October!
In the ancient world, they put it in an even simpler way: vae victis. (“woe to the defeated”)
So the point was, do NOT become the victis.
Woke means anti-White.
The principal anti-Whites are jews.
It’s Team Jew vs. Team White. (h/t Linder)
And it’s to the death. Why? Because the jews behind wokeness are commiting conscious and deliberate White genocide. They are open about it.
The solution is expulsion of these jews. Not horizontal expulsion from one part of Earth’s surface to another. That has been tried 109+ times. Vertical expulsion. Six feet under.
You know, the Pinochet solution.
Minus the water pollution, of course.
Nah, just kidding. We should pray the Rosary instead. That will miraculously turn their hearts, and turn rocks into candy too.
In the above we have build, woke, power, ideology, laws, regulations, decisions, and conservatives.
The one thing that subsumes all of the above, the one thing none of us can avoid is human behavior, verbal and nonverbal, which in the end is all there is, human behavior, people doing things.
From this perspective, the message Hood, and not just Hood, won’t like, but needs to hear, is that ideology is simply a mode of verbal behavior, and verbal behavior is species-specific.
Meaning, it’s the one thing that separates humans from every other species and is, therefore, something we can’t live without. In short, it’s an explanation, and explanations function by organizing our transactions with the world. And non-explanatory mankind can’t even be imagined.
And, since the job of the overwhelming amount of verbal behavior is used to direct nonverbal behavior, the idea that ideology is spawned by power hasn’t been true since human beings started to become a verbal species around, hmmm, let’s see, today’s Monday…., ah, around 70,000 years ago.
The real point today is not, what explanation, or ideology, can an individual or group adapt themselves to. The question is, are our explanations adaptive to the world? Of course, one can say that that’s an open question, and it very well may be. But, to the extent it’s a closed question, the answerr is No. And as far as Identity Politics is concerned, whether or not it will help human beings better adapt themselves to a recalitrant reality that doesn’t give a damn about what we believe in is most definitely a closed question. And when it comes to adaptation, a closed question answers itself.
That’s why we should not speak of The Triumph of Identity Politics, but rather
The Pyrrhic Victory of Identity Politics. Naturally, to make this clear would require an explanation. But that’d be better left for a follow-up comment.
Spoiler Alert:
It’s perfectly obvious that Identity Politics is a dangerously maladaptive explanatory system. The proof of this can be seen in the shambles that its Triumph has made of society. Just look around.
“Nah, just kidding. We should pray the Rosary instead. That will miraculously turn their hearts, and turn rocks into candy too.”
LOL!
You need to read up on the ethics of Islam. At least consider the effects of Usury on the World and why Islam prohibits it. Islam is called the middle way. It is a spiritual practice that balances the lower and upper drives in a human life. Islam prohibits priesthood due to its unatural practice. My point of reference is from a philosophic point of view. Our Western culture has lost its faith to the point where we confuse the message with the quality of the practitioners.
The Zionist propaganda against Muslims and Islam since 1948 has had its negative effect on the Western soul.
You can’t be serious.
Stop asking questions about my people!
And on Yom Kippur yet!
But their envisioned wet dream of a total surveillance state with social credit scores, CBDCs and subsistence-level UBIs (conditional on good behavior) requires a functioning electrical grid — and that could be denied them if the S really HTF.
Which is why culture correlates so highly with the whiteness of a state. Or province.
He meant reining in. (As in, pulling on the reins on a horse in order to control it.)
I’m sure the idea came first, but the further back you go, the less widespread that idea was.
So what changed?
The way I see it, mainstream – not deeply ideological or even particularly intellectual – proponents of “civil rights” laws assumed that these laws would have blacks up and equal in a jiffy. After all, why not? Since blacks are no different to whites, the only thing holding them down could have been unfair laws. Change those laws and, presto, equality.
Only it wasn’t so simple. Blacks weren’t becoming equal on schedule. So civil rights proponents had to go digging deeper to get at the “real roots” of inequality. And when that didn’t work, deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper (…) still. Lucky for them, there were readymade “ideas” they could latch onto, at first gingerly, then enthusiastically.
And here we are.
Judging by the comments here, I would say that there is hope… by extension, it’s not too late.
I see an awakening, but will it be enough?
I see many misspelling that – I wonder if the autocorrect does it.
Huh? The ‘crowd’ here is like 0.00001% of humanity. And half of them are bitching that you’re a conspiracy theorist, racist and BTW also an anti-semite.
I cannot, for the life of me, see any realistic sign that things are turning for the better, on the contrary, I think their main problem at the moment is that things are even easier than they could ever have hoped, turns out that even the most bizarre measures meet only futile resistance.
The people who are ‘awake’ (if you happen to meet one) are often clueless about the most basic answers to the ‘why’. They know some facts about kill shots or big pharma, and then they still ‘feel’ that, well, ‘but climate change is real, I can see it where I live’. ‘Oh man, but I’m a geophysicist and data scientist and really, if you start actually looking into it, it’s all bad science and fraud supported by massive propaganda’ … ‘Oh hmmm I don’t know, it can’t be right that we make so much extra CO2. And all the deniers are paid by the oil companies.’
The real pandemic is hammered into every child: ‘Your opinion counts!’ ‘I have my truth, you have yours’, that sort of shit. Modern ‘science’ is finding ‘facts’ that support a pre-chosen, permitted outcome.
Thus, you can hope all you want, I challenge you to at least scrutinize your own assertion:
Is that so? How do you know? Is it based on some real observation? Why wouldn’t it be too late? What would be your cue to declare the situation to be ‘too late to turn back’? What criterion can you think of? Because if it would be too late, we need to use completely different strategies.
This kind of questioning is good for whatever ‘they’ try to make us believe, but we need to apply it to our own beliefs, too.
Hi Tina,
Great comment! Thanks!
Well-reasoned and well-written.
By the way, and just for the record, whenever any of us get a Troll response, or LOL, or Disagree (with no follow-up argument that isn’t laced with vulgar, hateful, stupid, and childish ad hominems) from commenters like That Would Be Telling, or Realist (The Creepy Stalker Troll), etc. etc., it’s not only a compliment, it’s high praise, and proof in itself that we have hit a soft spot, which is them, being as they are soft all over.
Your statement:
is disingenuous to say the least and is insulting to those of us who had no say-so in the political matters of the day…
We were too young to have any influence on the political organs of the day…
It is the “greatest generation” that laid the framework for the dispossession of us “boomers”, especially us White males.
Previous to that, the generation that gave us the Federal Reserve and income tax have a lot to answer for.
Us “boomers” did not achieve any meaningful political power until the mid-1970s when those of the “greatest generation” were finally beginning to retire.
The high-point of true “wage growth” ended in 1970, when boomers were finally coming of age. This is when “defined benefit” retirement plans were being phased out in favor of “defined contributions” 401k plans. It was the “greatest generation” who was in power at the time that encouraged the replacement of defined benefits retirement plans with defined contributions plans
It was all downhill from there.
Us “boomers” inherited” the ills brought on by those of the “greatest generation”.
From the misguided “civil-rights (for some)” acts and “fair housing” laws, the final dispossession of us “boomers” was in place.
There was NO WAY us boomers could have reversed these “laws”.
Remember the usurious interest rates during the Carter years?
Us boomers may have some blame, but most of our problems were inherited…
Thanks, “greatest generation”…
A strongman or some type of ultra right wing dictator is the only way out if the JewSA doesn’t collapse of its own dead weight and soon.
I have my issues with Richie Hanania and his cognitive dissonance and seemingly talking out of both sides of his mouth on wokeness and race but at least he proposed a solution unlike so many dissident right writers and conservatives who write long winded columns about the problems facing us but never propose solutions because we all know the solutions are so extreme that they can’t be uttered using one’s real name.
Which is why culture correlates so highly with the whiteness of a state. Or province.
There is also an inverse correlation with gun violence once you take out suicide (which was inserted to fudge the stats for obvious reasons).
Us boomers may have some blame, but most of our problems were inherited…
Thanks, “greatest generation”…
So the greatest generation forced boomers to do drugs and listen to shitty folk music that oversimplified global conflicts?
What about the decades long line of boomer votes for race denying conservatives?
How many years will it take boomer conservatives to realize that the “Free market” cannot resolve the complex rigidities of race? Around 40-50 years?
Straight from the Talmudic Horse’s mouth:
The Jewishness of Wokeness
https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/the-jewishness-of-wokeness
“To be more precise, the new dispensation holds that social problems cannot be understood as bad things that somehow happened, or bad conditions that obtain due to misunderstandings or unavoidable complexities,” wrote William Voegeli, a senior editor at the Claremont Review of Books. “Rather, specific problems resulting from specific sins of commission and omission cannot be solved unless those sinners are identified, then forced to atone and change their ways”
Yes YT MAGA dudes ! You are already identified. Soon you’ll be forced to atone and change your ways – BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY !!!
Red Terror:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
OK, dem damn YT Russians were hereditary dyed-in-the-wool anti-semites, from the Czar all the way down. But why on earth Estonian hostages were killed by the thousands ?
See the pics in the article “Corpses of victims of the Palermo Forest Massacre carried out by the Bolsheviks(=Talmudists) at the end of 1918 to beginning of 1919 in the occupied Rakvere, Estonia” & “Corpses of victims of the 1919 Tartu Credit Center Massacre, among them Estonian bishop Platon, killed by the withdrawing Bolsheviks”
I never met an Estonian but IMHO they are peaceful hard-working people involved mainly in sustainable fishing. I remember buying cans of “sprats in oil” at Walmart which originated in Estonia.
Disclaimer: my comment being #88 is a coincidence. I am a philosemite. No shit.
LOL ((( Who, indeed ? )))
The explanation for why it would be more accurate to speak of The Pyrrhic Victory of Identity Politics, and not its triumph, can be found explanation itself. Or, to be more specific, explanatory behavior.
The expression of power mentioned in the opening paragraph of Hood’s essay is acted out and experienced in our social institutions. A social institution doesn’t simply depend on explanation, a social institution is an explanation.
The funny thing, or depressing, or both, about human behavior, is that you can get people to follow what on the surface sounds like a truthful sentence, but on examination turns out to be tautalogical or even nonsensical. You can even use them to acquire power. But you can’t use them as instruments of social management. Not for the long-term you can’t. And now we’re back to why Identity Politics will end in a Pyrrhic Victory, in defeat, not in triumph. Because explanations fail when they no longer make sense and don’t work, even when they’re sustained by force. And that’s the situation we’re in today – all of us – including the hostile elite, their useful idiots, and paid proxies – and, of course, us, their designated scapegoats.
The fact is as an explanatory system Identity Politics makes no sense. And neither do the many smaller, sub-explanations, as it were, that go into and support the overall system. This explanatory weakness produces a devastating social incoherence that undermines even the reasonable functioning of the social institutions Identity Politics now controls. A fact easily confirmed.
Let’s start with the overall explanatory system of Identity Politics. It says, in effect, that whites are powerful oppressors and nonwhites are the powerrless oppressed. And it says this in spite of the fact that Identity Politics is the dominant ideology (explanatory system), not just of contemporary society, but of world history. No other ideology or theology (same thing) has had this much control over human and natural resources – ever. Begging the questions:
How can anything dominant be oppressed? How can the powerless be so powerful?
Even if everyone obeyed the hostile elite’s every word the whole thing would still collapse because of this intolerable paradox, which becomes easier to see and harder to manage the more it is enforced.
Then there are all of the little subsidiary explanations that one finds in those ridiculous indoctrination/humiliation rituals being played out as we speak in our social institutions – all of them. They are attempting the impossible. They are attempting to deduce general laws from special experience. It can not be done. Up until recently one could learn that everyone from Plato to Hume, from Kant to Popper has said as much. But the reality-defying logic of Identity Politics says otherwise. Oblivious as ever to the fact that reality doesn’t give a damn what any of us think.
They are attempting to deduce general laws (All Whites Are Racist)
from special experience (our truth, or even more absurdly, my truth).
In fact, as we all know, they’re not attempting it. They’re imposing it by force. Now that’s what you call psychotic arrogance. That’s how much they hate reality. Again, you can acquire power with this nonsense. But you can not sustain it. When this kind of thinking not only enters our social institutions, but is continuously reinforced, it makes their full functioning an impossibility, even if, to repeat, everyone blindly obeyed (or rather, especially if everyone blindly obeyed). Which does indeed seem to be the case. Identity Politics is meeting with very little resistance.
And no, not because whites are stupid. Since there is no cultural category whites that statement itself is stupid. White is just a racial descriptor, ie; an abstraction. Which is why Identity Politics loves using it, since they can only think and speak in vague abstractions.
The reason Identity Politics is meeting little resistance is because most people the world over do whatever those in power tell them to do. A fact that a glance at history will easily confirm.
However, and this is arguably the only possible bright spot, history also shows us that every once in a while people, at least enough at first to form a critical mass, simply start saying No! to something that previously anything other than Yes! would have been unimaginable. If there’s anything those in power now understand, it’s that.
Maybe there’s not much we can do. But then, maybe we don’t need to do much. Maybe the best thing to do is to get out of their way and let them enjoy their Pyrrhic victory. Sure, we can count on them doing even more damage than they’re doing now, because damage is what they’re all about. That’s not the point. The point is that they seriously believe that they’re too big to fail. But we know better.
I admit I have not read Islamic ethics nor the Koran but I am certain that Islam shows some honorable traits including, the concept of One God, prayers (five a day may be excessive but who am I to judge), alms giving to the poor and even going on Pilgrimage to their holy places. But it also has some nefarious practices, such as Islam’s doctrines of deception of Hudna and Taqiyya, polygamy etc. I do not condemn nor condone Muslims but what I am saying is that educated Palestinians would fare much better in a world that disfavors less sophisticated. I do wish them well.
Your comment is a welcome mouthful of the water of sanity in a thread where neither the article nor most of the comments see, let alone address, any of the relevant points.
Precisely. What’s more, Hanania’s rejection of white consciousness and his pointedly public renunciation of any desire to name the Jew makes him doubly attractive to Sailer and most of Sailer’s puppy dogs. The fact that he looks and talks like a queen doesn’t seem to have done him any harm either.
Nor do I. The fact that Gregory Hood has gone full–Jared Taylor in describing Hanania’s misleading analysis as somehow indicative of brilliance speaks very ill of Hood. Ryan Andrews (comment no. 57) aptly noted that circularity was the least of the numerous defects attributable to Hanania’s presentation. Why have so few others seen this?
All such are managed opposition. They are working for the (((enemy))). Hanania has already profited handsomely at the expense of those who mistakenly look to him for an explanation of the core fact of life in the United States: an Orwellian level of oppression by the Jews.
The people who settled this land and, later, the people who devised the form of its government knew who they themselves were and whom they thought would be suitable immigrants. All Muslims were deemed unsuitable.
In practice, the admission and ever-growing presence of Muslims have been as destructive to the character of this imperial heartland—it is certainly no longer a country—as the takeover of government, media, and the economy by the Jews has been.
When I say that the idea came first, I don’t mean that the bundle of intersectional conspiracy theories that makes up far-left ideology today was fully fleshed out in anyone’s mind back in, say, 1960. Of course, the idea(s) have developed over time. And Hanania is not wrong that civil rights laws and regulations have affected the behavior and thinking of people. But every step along the way—every new law, regulation, or dear colleague letter—is the result of someone having the idea.
For instance, Hanania treats the implementation of affirmative action in college admissions as some sort of mysterious turn of bureaucratic “log rolling,” that went against the explicit wishes of the 1964 bill’s authors, and was resisted by the academy. But he never stops to ask why were the bill’s authors concerned by that possibility in the first place? Why would they think that a law to ensure equal rights for all would lead to preferential treatment for Blacks?
Could it be because it was already going on in certain places? James Burnham wrote that in the 1930s it was already well-known that NYU gave preference to Black applicants, though unofficially. But in 1963, that is, right before the bill was introduced, the Universities of Michigan and Washington implemented explicit affirmative action policies. And that is, not the affirmative action of the JFK executive order, which (I think) was only to encourage recruiting Blacks, but affirmative action as we know it today. The thumb-on-the-scale kind. And their reasoning behind it was very plain: even though the universities treated Black applicants equal to White ones, they were underrepresented in their student bodies. So they decided to privilege Black applicants. Simple as. Of course, the congressmen debating the bill would have been aware of this development, of equal rights not being enough.
Hanania is on firmer ground, I think, in his claims about the ‘diversity doctrine’ largely springing from one Supreme Court Justice who was the swing vote in the Baake case from 1978, but even here I don’t think the Justive came up with the idea out of whole cloth. Though it is not quite the same thing, the melting pot idea obviously predates that decision by decades. More relevantly, this decision came a little over a decade after the immigration reforms of 1965. It would have been around this time that non-traditional American races’ (Asians and Hispanics) share of the population would increased to more than a rounding error for the first time. In Hollywood, as Steve sailer has pointed out, this coincided with the move away from Western movies toward gangster movies (i.e. immigrant origin stories).
Of course, I think you’re right. Though, I imagine that many at the time thought (perhaps naively) that formal legal equality would be enough regardless of whether Blacks ever attained socioeconomic parity with Whites. Today, on the other hand, it is clear to me that even if they did reach socioeconomic parity with us, it would still not be enough.
I have seen huge wake ups in my neck of the woods. People I never dreamed are seeing truths.
Is it enough? I don’t know. But it’s more than we’ve had in decades.
There would have still been antiwhite assholes pushing antiwhite bullshit, but I think it would have been a much harder sell to get whites to go along with it.
The first book to be read is ‘The Culture of Critique‘.
«“when it was moved that sex be added to Title VII, the merits of the motion were obvious, and it was swiftly adopted.27 Indeed, as will appear from the review below of the debate in the House of Representatives,28 “It was difficult for anyone to speak against the amendment [adding sex] without appearing to favor discrimination against women, a position politically dangerous and hard to defend logically.”29 By adding sex as a protected class alongside of race, religion, and national origin, Congress recognized that sex discrimination was a significant problem that deserved as powerful a sanction as the other kinds of discrimination.”»
While discrimination against short ugly poor men is entirely legal, even if not having them as a protected category is difficult “without appearing to favor discrimination” against them, and is “hard to defend logically”.
But not being against discrimination against short ugly poor men is not “politically dangerous” while not being against discrimination against women (even if rich and beautiful) is because there is an important difference that matters a great deal to politicians:
* Most people vote on one “vote-moving issue”, and there are large groups of people who share certain “vote-moving issue”. It can be tax cuts, it can be guns, etc.
* The politicians who support a certain “vote-moving” instantly gain the votes of any group that votes on it, and those who oppose it instantly lose their vote, therefore politicians are very careful to select which “vote-moving issues” they support or oppose, and the bigger the groups that vote on one, the more careful they are.
* Many more women have “women’s interests” as their “vote-moving issue” than men have “men’s interests” as their “vote-moving issue”, because men vote more on economic interests than on sex interests.
* Politicians who support minority economic interests can gain more votes by supporting in addition “women’s interests” and get the votes of lots of women. Democrats pretty much did this once they decided to stop supporting the economic interests of the majority of working class people.
«proponents of “civil rights” laws assumed that these laws would have blacks up and equal in a jiffy. After all, why not? Since blacks are no different to whites, the only thing holding them down could have been unfair laws. Change those laws and, presto, equality.»
In Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” written in 1834, at a time when color “racism” was common there is a nice description of how equality before the law mattered:
«I said to someone who lived in Pennsylvania: “Kindly explain to me how, in a state founded by Quakers and celebrated for its tolerance, free Negroes are not allowed to exercise their civil rights. They pay their taxes; is it not fair that they should have the vote?” “You insult us,” he replied, “if you imagine that our legislators committed such a gross act of injustice and intolerance.”
“Thus the blacks possess the right to vote in this country?” “Without any doubt.”
“So, how does it come about that at the polling-booth this morning I did not notice a single Negro in the crowd?” “That is not the fault of the law,” said the American to me. “It is true that the Negroes have the right to participate in the elections but they voluntarily abstain from making an appearance.”
“That is indeed very modest of them.” “It is not that they are refusing to attend, but they are afraid of being mistreated. In this country it sometimes happens that the law lacks any force when the majority does not support it. Now, the majority is imbued with the strongest of prejudices against the blacks and the magistrates feel they do not have enough strength to guarantee the rights which the legislator has conferred upon them.”
“So you mean that the majority, which has the privilege of enacting the laws, also wishes to enjoy the privilege of disobeying them?”»
One aspect of present-day ignorance that is very striking is the widespread muddling of a great many idiomatic and metaphoric expressions whose forms and origins were once crystal clear to everyone. Images drawn from horseracing seem to be in especial danger of misconstruction nowadays. Thus, the gaffe “reigning in wokeness” isn’t especially surprising given that, here at Unz Review alone, more authors and commenters have written that something or other “has been given free reign” than otherwise.
As an amateur
mind readerpsychoanalyst might say, perhaps those guilty of this error simply like to think of themselves as being more at home in palaces than paddocks.Yes, “free reign” is a pet peeve of mine. Another is “could care less” instead of couldn’t care less. (And I’m only in my 40s – not old enough to be a fuddy duddy is it? Or maybe it is – gulp.)
We’ll just have to take the butt between the teeth and reverse this damnable trend. 🙂
After I had a laugh from reading this, it occurred to me that, yes, perhaps 80 percent of those who use the phrase in its more orthodox form haven’t the foggiest idea whose teeth and what bit are being alluded to. Under such circumstances, the journey of misunderstanding from bit to butt is a short one.
As for “could care less,” I feel your [ahem] pane. My own biggest gripe has to do with redundancies created by the failure to comprehend what share means, as in “John and Bob share the same goal” or “John and Bob share things in common.” Not long ago, I heard one of my neighbors say, “Both my wife and I share ownership of the same property”—a double pleonasm. In more sensible times, people have been executed for less.
The expression is “reining in,” not “reigning in” or “raining in.” Such confusion, which is pretty common now, is understandable since “reining in” presumably was coined in the era of horse transportation. “Reign” means to rule so “reign in” is another form of dysfunctional diversity.
I hope you realize that Jett Rucker, an intelligent long-time commenter, was being facetious.
The dominant (Jewish/non-Jewish Europeans) are not oppressed. The powerless (non-European pawns) are not powerful, the powerful are Jewish/non-Jewish Europeans.
Don’t overlook a “free rain” contestant pulling through in second place for the modern illiteracy sweepstakes.
I was there also, in the NYC area or close to it. I maintain that the 1960s were an organized operation that started before the first CRA was formed.
In the late 1950s / early 1960s media (effectively all of media) switched from songs for adult listeners and in the Western tradition to music intended for teens. “Slow dancing” music was phased out, and music made to listen to rather than dance to was played. This music had lyrics intended to devalue Western value (Zimmerman’s work, for example, but also the “folk music” such as “My Jordy will be hanged with a golden chain . . . Oh you judge, oh judge so cruel ..” in one song. Jordy had been slaughtering deer from a wildlife preserve/light cavalry training ground and selling them on the black market — something that is still illegal today).
Media changed from repetition of US Federal propaganda favoring warfare to severe criticism of warfare (compare “Sands of Iwo Jima” to “Apocalypse Now”) and also became much less entertaining. The US Army either failed or was directed to fail by putting Westmorland, a public relations General, in charge of the Vietnam War, where he got suckered by Tet when he was trying to provoke an NVA attack on Khe Sanh. The Western media presented everything about Vietnam in the most unfavorable light possible.
Self defense was made into a crime if done by a White. The Bernard Goetz case was a notable example. He shot multiple four attackers who used sharpened screwdrivers (lethal weapons) and was hailed as a hero for 24 hours on all stations (I heard this as it happened), and was then abruptly a villain on all stations. It was an amazing demonstration of perfect media control, one that nobody at the time objected to. (Note the similarity to the party orator in 1984 who was caught in mid speech by a switch in Oceania’s choice of allies. )
I can tell you that taking on 4 attackers at close quarters with just a pistol is a chancy affair. If just one of the attackers had thrust with his point weapon, Goetz would have lost badly. Shooting immediately and “keeping up the scare” to prevent a prompt regrouping and counter attack is about the only way to survive. (That is why the military universally uses “assault rifles” to counter close ambushes. The idea is that the ambushed troops “spray and pray” to suppress the ambusher’s fire and haul ass out of the kill zone. Note the similar reliance on firepower’s use by Goetz and ambushed Army troops.)
OK, nice stories, but what do they mean?
The operations described above were initiated before Pres. Johnson signed the 1964 CRA (and was subsequently discarded by his political backers). The expansion of the 1964 and subsequent CRAs was not as spontaneous as G. Hood suggests.
Note that the media operations of the late 1950s-late 1960s occurred at the same time the Irish faction’s leadership (JFK, RFK) was assassinated, and that RFK Jr. died “in a civil aviation accident” several years later, and that it was apparent common sense in Washington DC that ““Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” (C. Shumer).
What happened, IMHO, was the 1960s construction of a political and legal base for subsequent evolution to the 2023 “Woke” framework by some kind of coalition persisted until at least Pres. Obama’s second term, when Pres. Obama, who is half bright and believes himself to be an organizational genius, but is actually ham handed, seized power. He then implemented the Woke framework that the US lives under today. Obama also committed the US to win in Ukraine which seems very likely to end the US Empire.
I disagree that most of these people, at least most of those with any education and any exposure to the members of that race, ever believed that the negroes were equal to the whites in their general capacities.
For the Leftist, the problems are never actually material problems. They are always personal problems. The problems are not really social problems, because amelioration of the social problem only leads to more frustration. The problem is not really the super-rich. The problem for the Leftist is that there are traditional white families. Why is this a problem for a Leftist? Because it is a problem for the Jew. There is not really any such thing as Leftist antisemitism. No matter how much the Iranians or pro-Palestinians might align themselves with leftists around the world, they cannot be considered real Leftists even if they continually disclaim that they are not against Judaism. The Jews do not allow them to claim to be that, just as the Jews gradually withdrew that identity from Stalin. The Jews decide who is Left and who is not.
The Leftist has no identity, no mission, no guidance, no ability to think for himself, he is wholly dependent on the Jew to tell him what to think, just as the general populace depends on the Jew to tell him what sort of music is good or bad. The mistake of a silly negro “artist” “Kanye” or whatever that negro’s name might be in his own tongue, is that his fame only ever existed because the Jews said: “Here goyim, this is a famous negro, we give you permission to listen to this and consider it music.” They moment they withdrew their approval, he became not only yesterday’s news, but no longer a real celebrity. Indeed, if this whole thing hadn’t likely been planned out as a sort of “heel turn” – he would quickly sink into obscurity.
The gentile public in the judeo-masonic state looks to the the people who control the media, the politicians, etc, to tell them what is acceptable and what is not. And the Leftist looks to the Jew intellectual.
So getting back to the negro, why does the Leftist want to do all these things for the negro? Because they know that the negro, when given impunity, will kill his enemies, the white family in a suburban house. The Leftist is not motivated by morality, but by hatred.
An attempted “Gotcha”, but also an interesting point, and one that is relevant the citizens of a dictatorship that has the form of a representative democracy. I’ll italicize “terms of art”, words that have a different meaning inside political theory than they do in the vernacular.
In the theory of a representative democracy the representatives embody something called the will of the people. The will of the people is sometimes exercised through voting, but voting is at best a sample of the will of the people, and by no means enforces that the representatives actually embody the will of the people. What then? What happens if the representatives get it wrong, or try to set up a dictatorship in which organized representatives control voting through political parties that are no more than coalitions that represent only a small fraction of the total population?
Well, according to the theory of a representative democracy, the law has no special status. Passing a law that says people must piss up a rope while standing on their heads has no special status, as does passing a law that says people have to let the State castrate or spay their children. the people can simply ignore the law, and can even (as has happened several times in US history) destroy the political coalition that had previously controlled voting.
That will of the people won’t please everybody is taken for granted, and that it may do things it later regrets is a necessary consequence of the representative democracy. This, of course, is the situation of any known system of government. Kings, tsars, or dictators can pass whatever law they please, but that doesn’t mean the law is followed.
If Blissex wants a morally irreproachable regime, then the result will be something like Calvin’s rule of Geneva ( https://www.stephenhicks.org/2010/11/27/john-calvins-geneva/ ) or perhaps the Prohibition era in the US. If he wants (as Blissex apparently does) a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society, he should consider moving to urban areas in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Seattle.
Indeed I shouldn’t. Counsels of pessimism seldom turn out to be bad advice nowadays.
Such complex thinking!
Exactly. I’ve long felt that those who believe “Democrats” to be the root of all evil in America are simply too cowardly to say “blacks.” Blacks are not victims of Democrats; they are victimizers of everyone, even their own kind.