Today on MindMatters we look at Wokeness through the lens of ponerology (with current examples, e.g., the recent GameStop controversy). For psychopaths, ideologies serve as the perfect trojan horse for taking power, and wielding it. Wokeness - with its cynical views of human nature and explicit authoritarianism - is just another variation on the theme of the twentieth century, which saw the rise of communism and fascism. Once the ideologues have taken power, the ideology ceases to bear any resemblance to its original form. Rather, it becomes a mask for pure pathology. And by that time, it's usually too late to stop it.
Running Time: 01:13:24
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Here is the transcript:
Adam: Hello and welcome to Mind Matters everyone.
Harrison: Hold on a second. I think your camera angle is off.
Adam: Is it? Let me look. Yeah. Okay, well let's fix that. I don't know how that happened. Sorry folks. Technical difficulties there.
Harrison: It was just the awesomeness of the T-shirt. It's gravity.
Adam: The gravity of the weight of its awesomeness.
Harrison: It just pulled the camera down. Glad we got that fixed.
Elan: Wait a minute. What does your T-shirt say Adam? What is that?
Adam: It just says Ertugrul and then it's got a little symbol here.
Elan: Is that the Kayi tribe?
Adam: Yes, it is the symbol for the Kayi tribe because that's where Ertugrul is from so that's why they have it on his name there.
Harrison: It's a great T-shirt.
Elan: Well maybe we'll have to do a show on Ertugrul one day, I think.
Harrison: We've got a couple already. Don't you remember? {laughter}
Elan: Oh yeah. It's just such a great show I want to talk about it again. But not today.
Adam: Not today.
Elan: So with that...
Adam: So with that, all said and done, this week we're going to be going over a couple of things, one of which is this little bit from James Lindsay's New Discourses where he talks about wokeness as the lock pick to the gates of western civilization, going over what he means by that and also the implications moving forward because this is something that I think we all should be paying attention to - the transformation. It's one thing for wokeness to exist as an ideology and for it to get pushed forward, but as the implementation continues to move forward it's going to change. Its initial aim and purpose has already been accomplished.
So what it's going to be used for going forward is going to change and we need to pay attention to how that change is coming about and what that change looks like. So just as a brief summation of what James spoke about in his little video clip, was the critical social justice theory or wokeness, was the lock pick to western civilization. So what does it mean to have a gate to western civilization? What does it mean to be the lock pick?
Well the gate to western civilization was the culture because this was theorized by Antonio Gramsci I think is his name, Italian?
Harrison: Albanian-Italian.
Adam: Albanian-Italian. Can't trust those Albanians, {said humorously} who theorized that part of the reason why in western societies there was not this uprising of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie was that the strength of the culture was too great to allow for any kind of destruction of that culture. They were essentially too cohesive. There was no great swath of disenfranchised. They were English, they were French, etc. etc. and that was who they were so they didn't need something else to try and give them an identity because they already had one.
So that's what the gate in the gates of western civilization means. It was the door barring the revolution from coming and turning these western countries into communist states. Now there's the lock pick and the lock pick is critical social justice theory. What it was trying to do was to undermine the culture of western states such that it would allow for western cultures to be infiltrated and destroyed to the extent that they could be subverted and the states taken over by communists, essentially.
So that was his idea as to what wokeness was really meant and intended to do. It was intended to subvert the culture, infiltrate the culture, subvert it, destroy it, weaken it so that it could be infiltrated and taken over. He argues that it is more or less complete and I would daresay that I agree to a large extent because one of the things about western civilization, what it was that prevented things from devolving into a communist state was the values of personal private property, individual rights which preceded government, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." the thing. {laughter} Those inalienable rights are above and precede the government which is outside of the realm of what a communist would say because all things are given to and by the state as opposed to being given by god. Due process of law is another value.
So these are things that created an impediment for communist revolution and communist takeover. These are some of the very things that we see being destroyed on principle by critical social justice theory because those values are based on the principle of equality, not equity but equality. Equality of opportunity specifically whereas the critical social justice theory, in its critiques of all of the ills of western civilization has said that that is one of the fundamental problems of equality, that the fundamental problem of equality is unattainable and so it should be discarded in pursuit of equity.
Never mind that the search for equity is a total pipe dream, an impossibility and we know this through examining history. But nevertheless that is what they say. So the wokist march towards changing of the cultural narrative to push for equity as opposed to equality is or has been one of its main points, one of its main reasons for being. It has accomplished that to a great extent I believe. I was listening to one of the Biden administration people - I don't remember who it was, there's so many and they're all so diverse I can't...
Harrison: Can't tell them apart. {laughter}
Adam: Yeah. They're so diverse I can't tell them apart. But they were saying, "We've got the climate justice equity office of climate change equity justice" which is like, I have no idea what you're talking about and what this is supposed to be. But nevertheless "This is a new department within our government that is specifically aimed at equity." So again, this is the infiltration right in front of your eyes. Do you guys have anything you want to add?
Harrison: Yeah. I have a couple of points. First, I want to expand a bit on the idea that the goals have already been achieved in a sense. We've been talking about ideologies and the progression of them in several episodes and the thing about wokeness is that it resembles, to a great degree with the examples you mentioned, the various communist ideologies and the way they've been put into practice in the 20th century for the most part. The point that I've made a few times specifically in reference to Mao but not just, is the impossibility of the goals of the ideology, which you alluded to.
You pointed out a funny contradiction that they see the equality goals of a liberal culture as impossible in some sense, so replace them with an even more impossible goal which would be equity. So when you have an impossible goal, then there can always be a motivation and a drive to pursue that goal and it will be never-ending. So in a sense it's like a free energy machine. It constantly provides the energy for more progress and more change which will never be achieved and therefore any means necessary can be used to pursue that goal which will never be achieved which means those means can always be used and those means will become increasingly repressive and oppressive as this progresses.
But there are a few characteristic qualities and phenomena about ideologies and their adherents that progress and that you can see by looking at the historical record and with a guide like Ponerology, you can see what's actually going on with these ideologies.
It starts out with an ideology which on the surface is what it says it is. Nowadays we have wokeness and we have the goals of wokeness which a lot of people have taken at face value and say, "Okay, I've adopted these goals and values now for myself and I want to achieve them." Some of these people are decent people or good-hearted and have gotten caught up in it and become a bit messed up in the head by virtue of just having adopted this crazy ideology, but when it comes down to it they don't necessarily want to see gulags and their families put in prison or anything like that. Some of them do and of course it would be nice to know the numbers.
But you have the dupes or the useful idiots or the people who genuinely believe the ideology that have come to believe it because they have been propagandized, because they have been educated by the people pushing the ideology. The people pushing the ideology, most of them and many of them, are also true believers with slightly different motivations because they're the ones that have got the most drive behind them because they are the ones actually creating and promoting the ideology.
Now, that's only a first phase of the ideology and the first goals in the pursuit of the aims and the goals of that ideology are to get power, to get into power to be able to implement it, to be able to turn the theory into practice and to be able to start getting real results. That has happened over the last 10 or 20 years through the infiltration of the entire educational system and as we've talked about in previous shows, pretty much every institution in western civilization. The frame of reference for us is the United States and Canada, but not just the United States and Canada. It's pretty much worldwide to a degree, but in the English-speaking world and in the western world in particular or in the wider sense, but you see the language everywhere even coming out of countries that wouldn't be considered that.
You see social justice ideology coming out of Chinese state media, usually as a criticism of western governments. They've adopted it as a means of criticizing the west. "This seems to be working so we'll use it too." So you constantly see foreign countries criticizing western countries for their white supremacy and racial discrimination and systemic racism and things like that. So it has become global in that sense, all the institutions, education, the justice system, youth organizations like Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, the government. You talked about all these new departments that are springing up. Every corporation...
Adam: Religious institutions.
Harrison: Religious institutions. It's pretty much everywhere. And of course even small businesses who might not be big enough or have the inclination to have a diversity, inclusion and equity board or whatever, will then be subject to cancel culture and having their business dry up or be boycotted because of a social media campaign, things like that.
So in a sense, that part of the goal has been completed. The ideology has managed to infiltrate every aspect of society, of culture, Hollywood, the media, TV which is also Hollywood, music, entertainment, the media. Every aspect of culture has been infiltrated and it's inescapable. You see it everywhere.
So what is the goal from then on? Well if you're just looking at it from the surface then you could say 'well that will just progress' and now the useful idiot response might be, 'okay, well now that everyone's in these positions, things will either get better or stay the same or get worse', but you can't look at it just using those same categories. There are other things going on.
So that's what I think James Lindsay is talking about when he says that now wokeness is only 15% of the problem. I'll give my perspective on that now. I mentioned all of the true believers and the fellow travelers and the people that adopted it because it sounds like a good idea and because they've been indoctrinated to think it's a good idea and because it seems to align with what they think their values are. But then there are the people who actually don't believe the propaganda. There is something going on beneath the surface of this ideology, just like there was behind the communist ideology.
I think I'm going to read a few paragraphs from Political Ponerology just to give an idea of where I'm coming from. These are from a couple of the sections on ideologies that Lobaczewski writes about:
"An ideology of a secondarily ponerogenic association..."So this is a group or movement that adopts an ideology that is influenced to a large degree by psychopaths and people with other personality disorders. That's what he calls a secondary ponerogenic association.
"...This ideology is formed by gradual adoption of the primary ideology (wokeness in this case, social justice) to functions and goals other than the original formative ones."So no longer the surface definitions of diversity, inclusion and equity. As crazy as those might be on their own.
"A certain kind of layering or schizophrenia of ideology takes place during the ponerization process."Ponerization is as the ideology and the movement becomes more saturated with bad actors.
"The outer layer closest to the original content is used for the group's propaganda purposes, especially regarding the outside world although it can in part also be used inside with regard to disbelieving lower echelon members. The second layer presents the elite with no problems of comprehension. It is more hermetic, generally composed by slipping a different meaning into the same names. Since identical names signify different contents depending on the layer in question, understanding this doubletalk requires simultaneous fluency in both languages."So we already see a doubletalk even on what I might consider the first layer of social justice. Lindsay on New Discourses has an entire lexicon, an encyclopedia or dictionary of words with what the word is and what it actually means. So there's a very specific and non-intuitive definition for all kinds of normal words in social justice like wokeness. So racism actually means something different. Inclusion means something different. Diversity means something different.
So when people say these words they think they know what they mean and because they sound like good words, they think they agree with the ideology when in fact they're agreeing with something that's completely different than what they think it is.
"Average people succumb to the first layer's suggestive insinuations for a long time before they learn to understand the second one as well. Anyone with certain psychological deviations, especially if he is wearing a mask of normality with which we are already familiar."That's like the psychopathic mask of sanity, pretending to be something that you're not when behind you're actually hiding a very depraved nature. In the example I've brought up many times, serial killers who present a mask of sanity like Ted Bundy to his victims only to reveal what he's actually after which is something completely different and having no congruence with the image he presents of himself.
"So anyone with certain psychological deviations immediately perceives the second layer to be attractive and significant. After all, it was built by people like him. Comprehending this doubletalk is therefore a vexatious task, provoking quite understandable psychological resistance. This very duality of language however, is pathognomonic (characteristic of this specific disease) a pathognomonic symptom indicating that the human union in question (the movement) is touched by the ponerogenic process to an advanced degree."So when you see this kind of doubletalk going on, you know that the movement itself has been degraded and infiltrated itself by psychopaths and personality disordered individuals to a large degree. So that's kind of what's going on. Then a bit further on he expands on this and says,
"The main ideology succumbs to symptomatic deformation in keeping with the characteristic style of this very disease and with what has already been stated about this matter previously in this book."
So basically he's just saying it follows a characteristic pattern, this deformation of the ideology.
"The names and official contents are kept but another completely different content is insinuated underneath, thus giving rise to the well known doubletalk phenomenon within which the same names have two meanings, one for initiates, one for everyone else. The latter (the one for everyone else), is derived from the original ideology. The former (the one for initiates) has a specifically pathocratic meaning, (pathocracy meaning rule by the diseased or the sick). something which is known not only to the pathocrats themselves but also by those people living under long term subjection to their rule."I'll read the paragraph before that too.
"Thus, a well-developed pathocratic system no longer has a clear and direct relationship to its original ideology which it only keeps as its primary traditional tool for action and masking (masking it's true nature)."So what you have is the original ideology, in this case wokeness, social justice theory, the push for diversity, inclusion and equity, and once the doubletalk phenomenon has shown itself to any significant degree and once they achieve power, the thing is, that ideology then becomes obsolete. So for all the people who actually believe in that ideology, it's no longer serving their purposes.
So when the woke actually gain power it won't be the true believers who reap the benefits of woke ideology. Woke ideology will then be used in a completely caricaturish manner, which is amusing and depressing because it's so caricaturish to begin with. But this is where I think that it would be good to have a novel or a movie or TV show, a futuristic dystopian 1984, Brave New World-esque presentation of this to show what that might look like because people don't seem to have the imagination to project how that might look, to see a woke totalitarianism where, in the name of diversity, inclusion and equity, those words are used simply to destroy anyone that gets in the way of the ideology with zero connection to the actual ideology or the words themselves.
Akin to, for example, in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist purges or in Mao's China where you could be arrested and charged with something that a case couldn't even conceivably be made that there's any connection between what you did and what you're charged with. At least in the current day, people can make the argument. You might not agree with the argument but at least you can see the paralogic of the argument. You can see, for example, why Proud Boys or any kind of right-wing group might be associated with certain crimes or certain labels. You can see how it makes sense.
But when adherence to the original ideology, when woke people themselves are then charged with the exact same crimes with themselves being white supremacists, with themselves - I wish I was better just putting on the lingo but I can't do it - charged with...
Elan: Domestic terrorism.
Harrison: Well domestic terrorism or...
Adam: Would it be more like a black head of the black lives matter movement doing something, whatever it is, and then getting charged with promoting white supremacy.
Harrison: Yeah.
Adam: It could just be the promotion of wanting a family, among the black community. A black member of the black lives matter movement could say, "I think black men and black women should sit down and have families" and then they get charged with promoting the patriarchy, promoting white supremacy and then that's kind of what you're talking about. This can go, in terms of them getting charged with something that has very little to no relation whatsoever to the actual...
Harrison: Well it could be that the woke government puts into effect a woke law or policy that ends up hurting minorities in some way and then the black lives matter activist says, "This is hurting black people. This is hurting our community." And then they go to prison for promoting white supremacy. That's the level of disconnect that this will lead to, to the point where all of the original adherents to woke ideology are now living in their own crazy world whereas all the non-believers were already living in a crazy world.
When the movement turns on THEM, it will be a shock. It's already happened to a certain degree, nothing huge, or to the extent of the Stalinist purges or anything like that, but you have had woke individuals who have been cancelled themselves for breaking some kind of woke taboo and then feeling the wrath of the woke on them.
Adam: Hello again everyone. Just a brief interruption here. We had originally recorded the second half of the show you were just watching and then after editing it, we had some perfect fodder for what we were just discussing in the form of GameStop and all of the rhetoric coming out being defamatory of it so we just had to bring it to you guys and edit this show to include it because it was just such a perfect example of what we were talking about we can't not include it.
Harrison: It's epic. {laughter}
Adam: It's totally epic.
Harrison: Could one of you guys just give a really brief rundown, really short, for anyone who might not know what's going on, on Wall Street?
Elan: Sure. So actually what happened was this. You had a group of individuals communicating on a Reddit group who had decided together to counteract what was a massive short selling by a hedge fund. What this means is that you have these companies who pool together a lot of money and bet against a particular corporation doing well. So what they do is anticipate or create reality on the ground by short selling or borrowing stock in a particular company in the hopes of selling it later when the price has gone down and they basically drive the price down.
So they target companies for elimination, you might say. Short selling is pretty common on Wall Street, but it's also a feature of vulture capitalism.
Harrison: Banking on the failure of other companies and businesses.
Elan: It is. That's a good way to explain it. What happens quite often is that you have the most outspoken and brazen individuals who run hedge funds coming out and poo-pooing the future of a particular company in order to drive the price down, in order to facilitate their manipulations.
So getting back to this group on Reddit, they decided what they would do with this company called GameStop is buy it long. They would drive the price up and counteract the short selling that the hedge funds were attempting to do. This was a Main Street meets Wall Street battle of wills where you had thousands, probably tens of thousands of individuals investing a lot of money in driving the price up, which creates what's called a short squeeze where the people who are investing in the prediction that the price would go down would actually be forced at some point to pay for their losses.
There are probably better explanations of that but the main gist of it is that you have a lot of individuals who have caught on to the games of Wall Street and probably one of the most interesting, entertaining elements to this whole story was when apps like Robinhood, which facilitate retail traders, which help the every man to buy stock, decided to close or forestall any more trades in GameStop precisely because there were so many people going in and buying it and driving the price up and making the hedge funds effectively lose money in the near future.
So everybody paid attention to this and realized that there's something quite wrong with the game here. There's something going on that reveals how markets in the US and in the west actually work and that is that they're all geared towards the monopoly capitalism, vulture capitalism that has been set up to make the rich much richer and the common person less likely to acquire any kind of personal wealth.
So what's at least as interesting as this story is how it's being covered in the news. With that, we saw a very interesting bit of spin on this whole story that speaks directly to wokeness and critical race theory and how it manages to insinuate itself into every kind of public discussion or event of news and importance. So did we want to pull that up?
Harrison: Well before we pull that up, I just want to give a bit more background and details to round out the picture. We've got a few players so far. We've got the Reddit investors, we've got the Wall Street hedge fund douchebags, we've got GameStop of course, which I'm pretty sure is just a brick and mortar game store.
Adam: Yeah.
Harrison: So it's not like an online store or anything. It's a store like ToysRUs or Blockbuster but for video games so you can go in and buy video games. These hedge funds were banking on GameStop's failure, that their stock is going to go down and they're going to get rich. So the Redditers are like, "We like GameStop. We don't like what we're seeing. We're going to invest in GameStop and the price is going to go up" and because the price goes up that means the hedge funds will lose money, like you said, and if it goes up a lot, they could lose a lot of money.
I don't know all the details but I think there might even be time limits. You're holding this stock and the higher it goes up the more you'll have to pay if it stays high so the all the people that are shorting it in order to lose as little money as possible, they're incentivized to get out as it's rising because there's the risk that it will rise even higher and they'll have to pay even more money.
So they were really put in a bind by all these Reddit investors. The irony or the funny thing about it is that the tables were totally turned because usually it's the hedge fund that has you by the short hairs or that manipulates markets and gets away with this kind of thing and here it is a bunch of Redditers who aren't necessarily wealthy. They could just be investing $20, $50, $100, $200 as opposed to the billions that hedge funds do. Some of these hedge funds and big capital groups on Wall Street have lost billions of dollars so far. At least that's what I've read. I saw one loss of $53 billion, another $27 billion or something. So it can actually have effects.
Now what happened right away was, like you said, Robinhood, the app that allows regular people to buy and sell stocks, people who got in early and bought stocks found that they could not buy any more. They could only sell. A few days later they made it so that you could only buy one stock or something, you couldn't buy multiple shares. They did that for multiple stocks too. So they limited trading on multiple stocks which seems pretty shady.
So those are some of the players. There are a few more players. There was the sub-Reddit itself, there was Facebook associated with it, I think the Reddit is Wall Street Bets. Is that what it's called?
Elan: Mm-hm.
Harrison: So right away, I think it was a day or two after the Facebook page was shut down, perhaps because of another one of those Facebook AI key word catchers to find racism, sexism, whatever, because they were using words like loss porn, so nothing to actually do with porn but just the word, so it got shut down because of threats of sexual violence or something like that, even though it had nothing to do with anything actually related to whatever the terms of use or content on Facebook are.
So there was that. Did one message board or something get shut down? There was one because of sexism.
Adam: There was the Discord server.
Harrison: The Discord server. That's right.
Adam: The Discord server got shut down for hate speech and white supremacist language and I think one or two other things that were totally absurd.
Harrison: Sexism was one.
Adam: Sexism I think is possibly one of them. Somebody that I looked at found whatever text or audio or whatever was being used in that case to shut that server down and said that the audio wasn't even from the actual Discord server that they had shut down. So it's shady on so many different levels.
Harrison: Well this is what we were talking about earlier in the show which we recorded several days ago where there's a progression to how these kinds of things work. I think I mentioned something like we're at the point nowadays and we have been, where a case can be made for how these accusations play out that seems reasonable on the surface because there does seem to be at least a correlation between the charge and the actions. Not always of course. Sometimes stuff just gets made up.
But in this case, I'm just going to take the censors at their word and say let's say there was sexist stuff on this board. Well, it seems to me that that sexist stuff probably was always there. It's like a culture thing. These Wall Street betters on this site were as bro as you could get. So there's going to be a lot of offensive language and stuff going on there.
So what happens is you've got this Wall Street bet culture, whatever it is, and even if you don't like it, whatever, but it has been there for years probably. I don't know how long the sub-Reddit has been around for. Then their Discord server which has also been around for a while, people have been talking on there the way they talk for months, if not years, however long it's been around. So why do they get shut down THAT day as this is all happening? It seems very convenient.
Not only that, the Facebook page, why on THAT day or in those few days following? Now bring up one of those tweets. I can't remember which one it was. What is the headline? "Far Right Extremists Use GameStop Chaos to Radicalize and Recruit on Telegram." So Elijah Schaffer writes, "It's all too predictable. Anything that goes against globalism, fights against degeneracy or helps the common man get ahead is leaning to white supremacy and the far right."
So regarding Discord, Telegram Facebook, Reddit, there have been these accusations. Again, there might be some justification for them. I don't agree that that justification necessarily means there should be any kind of action taken against it because I'm a pretty hard core advocate of free speech, even speech I don't like. But all of these avenues of communication tied to this phenomenon, this GameStop short selling phenomenon are being targeted, either with being shut down or with the accusations and the headlines about them and they're all coming now. Again, this language that they're using has probably been around for months or years and they're all getting hit by it now, being accused of it now.
So tying this back to what I said earlier, it's almost like the dynamic playing out can be seen in the micro-microcosm with a single individual on Twitter where if you scroll through anyone's Twitter page, chances are you're going to find something offensive whether it's one year back to 10 years back. You're going to find something that can be used against them to tarnish their reputation because they said something that maybe wasn't offensive back when they said it but it's now offensive and that can be used to destroy their reputation and destroy their career, whatever.
The way I see what's happening is that any of these "isms" that can even implausibly be used against someone or plausibly - it's like they're held in reserve - "Now at the moment I need it, I can then unleash this on them to destroy them."
So the fact that this Wall Street bets thing got big and they were taking on Wall Street and taking on these hedge funds, it's like, "Now I've got you mother flubber because look at all the stuff I've got on you. Now I'm going to hit you with everything I've got." If there was any actual real justification for it, then it would be dealt with at the time. The fact that they're dealing with it now shows that that's not the reason that it's happening. If sexism was really the issue on the Discord server or if white supremacy was really the issue on Telegram, then those things would have been dealt with already. The fact that they're all being dealt with right now only when there's publicity around the thing shows that there's another agenda, at least to me that seems obvious.
It would be the same with any individual. Let's say someone runs for office who someone doesn't like and the day after they run for office, they get all these lawsuits filed against them for things from five, 10, 15 years ago. Well where's all the stuff coming from? If there was a crime committed in the past, why is it only coming to light now when they happen to be running for office? It's not a perfect example but it's a similar dynamic going on.
Bring up that other one too. Within a day or two we see this other tweet which is unrelated to GameStop. This is the Washington Post. "Opinion: guns are white supremacy's deadliest weapon. We must disarm hate." From this guy Dave Smith. Literally everything that goes against the establishment is now white supremacy.
So again, either you love guns or you hate them but they've been an issue forever. Now there has to be a link between guns and white supremacy. This, again, is one of those things where you can plausibly make a link to it. I'm sure there are some actual white supremacists that like guns. It's pretty obvious. It's probably a certainty. But when they say 'white supremacy', they don't mean white supremacy. White supremacy does not mean what you think it means. Most people know what white supremacy is and don't like it. It's an obvious thing and it's almost a universal cultural norm and value not to like white supremacy.
When they say white supremacy they're talking about systemic racism and that everyone and everything essentially is white supremacist because we live in a certain culture, just because of the systemic nature of our society and culture and the history of humanity. You can't not be a white supremacist unless you are one of the oppressed and if you are a minority who disagrees with critical race theory or identity politics then you are also white supremacist, even if you're not white.
Elan: An "Uncle Tom".
Harrison: Yes. I can't remember if it was the Washington Post too or some other mainstream newspaper that had to come out with the word 'multiracial whiteness' because it's not just white people anymore {laughter} who are racist white people, it's all these other coloured people who are also tainted by whiteness and white supremacy.
Elan: It's like self-hating Jew for any Jewish person who happens to be critical of Israel. "You must be a self-hating Jew if you're in any way critical of Israel."
Harrison: It's all total nonsense, but what we SEE is holding these things in reserve so that they can be taken out of your pocket whenever you need them. This group now is making trouble for some kind of establishment institution - it could be Wall Street Today, it could be City Hall tomorrow, any kind of government or other big corporation - that group will then be targeted for these very reasons because with a person on Twitter you can always find something. That's the beauty of identity politics. You can always find something, even if it's not there.
That's the progression. It gets to the point where even if there is literally nothing there, they'll find it. They'll create it. They'll manufacture it and you can't escape it because like critical race theory's white supremacy, you can't not be a white supremacist if they accuse you of being one. It's kind of like a nationwide Kafka trap where you get accused of it and nothing you say can absolve yourself of it after you've been accused of it. It's just taken as a given, something to just be assumed to be true and any denial of that accusation on the part of the accused is taken as further proof of their guilt.
So it's an impossible situation and it's perfect for the establishment. It's perfect for these Wall Street guys. It's perfect for the people in power because it can be doled out and used whenever convenient, whenever they need it to be used when you have this category that's so loose that you can accuse anyone of infringing upon it, then it's a very easy way to take out your enemies. So a lot of the people that I think I mentioned are the naïve believers and dupes and useful idiots, the people who think there are actual liberal values behind something like critical race theory, they're the ones that don't realize that the kind of people that wield this as a weapon are not the kind of people you want to be friends with. In fact they probably are your enemies and they will turn it on you as well.
You'll get caught up in the collective guilt and collective punishment because that's also a thing with cancel culture and with identity politics and all of this stuff. When you see people in terms of their group identity then any member, any individual that can be either plausibly or implausibly placed within that group can then be blamed along with the whole group, any individual can be blamed and the whole group can be blamed for what any individual does.
This is why communism was so atrocious in the 20th century because this is exactly what the Bolsheviks and Mao did. They blamed an entire class of people simply for some surface-level group identity. It was the kulaks in Russia and pretty much anyone in China. It got to the point after the great leap forward where if you disagreed or did anything against Mao's policies, Mao himself or his subordinates would label you a rightist or a revisionist or a capitalist subversive or whatever, even if you were just a farmer trying to make a few extra dollars by selling something on the street because you couldn't make enough working on the collective farm.
So you get grouped in with a class of people, judged because of that class and even if that group didn't do anything wrong, even if it's just a convenient scapegoat to take the blame for someone else's failure - in China's case it was Mao - then you're the one that's going to suffer for it. The unfortunate thing is that everyone can conceivably be part of a group that can conceivably be blamed for doing something wrong and for having some unforgivable feature or sin associated with them.
That is very dangerous and I don't think there's anyone who would want that for themselves, naturally. No one wants to be blamed and punished for what someone else does because either they have the same skin colour, the same religion or the same beliefs, but some people are very willing to do that to others to the extent of killing them in the streets because of those very same things.
So these Wall Street bets guys are not getting lynched in the streets or anything, but this same dynamic is what we're seeing and this is the direction that these things go. Even though it's just a bunch of Wall Street betting bros seemingly - well more than that now - it still is a sign of what's going on and of things to come. This is a very similar dynamic, if you notice, with Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Discord. It was the same thing after January 6th with not just Trump but conservative groups. With Trump he got banned from everything but you had groups being banned, tens of thousand if not hundreds of thousands of people banned on Twitter, Facebook, Google. It was a coordinated, targeted effort on either individuals or groups. That's pretty scary.
Adam: So there's that switch, like what we were talking about with the switch from wokeism being purely an ideology to now being a mask for subversive purposes. It's the exact same thing. The tweet that we saw that had "Far right extremists on Reddit try to destroy the markets" or however they described it, these guys are not a political collective. I imagined that there was quite a significant number of people who were on the left who were actively participating in some of this.
Harrison: Yeah.
Adam: They've even come out and said that this is a mixture of - what was it in 2011?
Harrison: Occupy Wall Street.
Adam: Yeah. A mixture of Occupy Wall Street and Trumpist populism. They're coming out and saying that this is a bipartisan thing.
Harrison: Here's something everyone can agree on.
Adam: Yeah, it's something that everybody can agree on so you can't throw out the label of far right extremists with any sincerity. But that's the thing. They're not being sincere. That's the whole point.
Harrison: And they can't do it.
Adam: And they can't do it.
Harrison: And they will do it.
Adam: They can and they will do it regardless, but the people who are cheering for this, these types of banning of conservative viewpoints on Facebook and Twitter and everything because they've bought into the woke notion that conservatism is far right extremism, cheering this on is a very dangerous game to play because then you run the risk, as this Overton window gets shifted farther and farther, of being on the far left right now but given time, you could be on the outside of that window and then you're the one who's being canceled for something that today seems reasonable by far left standards, but tomorrow is totally beyond the pale.
And that's another reason why the whole backwards revision of history and judging history by today's standards, that's why it's just not a good idea because then you become held to standards that you don't know, that you can't know, really. So that's just another one of those "This is dangerous guys. We shouldn't be toying with this."
Elan: Well it's kind of this aggressive tool that's meant to knock you back on your heels or to at least create the impression among the impressionable, the individuals who have no context or understanding for the news watching, that this is really a white supremacist or evil action among people. Anyone who does this sort of thing happens to be a racist individual. People are being misled, as you said earlier. They're being redirected to think about certain news events in a certain way.
Getting back to Occupy Wall Street, which might have been the last viable movement that was gaining traction from the left in 2011, this was a response to Wall Street being bailed out in 2008 after the subprime mortgage fiasco and all of the ridiculous trades that were putting banks into jeopardy and that ultimately hurt everyone who had money in a 401K or who was being led to believe that their investments were actually sound investments.
So you had this liberal movement in 2011 that was gaining traction and what happened soon after? You had identity politics being force-fed into the minds of individuals who actually had a very good gripe and approach to - well it's arguable how good an approach it was - but it was certainly a good thing to bring awareness to and to point out. So that's how it has been used, this critical race theory, to steer the left from more viable causes and strategies to address certain real issues that have affected tens of millions of people in the US.
I did want to get back to the second tweet we had up Adam, because the second tweet on white supremacy was a response to an article in, I think the Washington Post, which was an opinion piece written by a woman who starts off by looking at a picture of an individual in the capitol on January 6th with a confederate flag. The connections that she makes in trying to paint everything that happened on that day as a manifestation or an outgrowth of white supremacy, is ridiculous.
The way she does this is to tell a sad story of her family and some people who were killed by a racist with a gun and with a confederate flag or there's a confederate flag somewhere in the imagery of that story, and ties all of that with this picture of a man with a confederate flag in the capitol building and conflates these two elements into something that is supposed to mean that anyone with a confederate flag would therefore have a gun and therefore be white supremacist and therefore be more likely to kill people. That's essentially the connection that she tries to create in the reader's mind.
What it is, is an appeal to the emotions. It's meant to bypass any kind of reasonable, critical thought about who Trump supporters are by and large and how many of them may actually be racist or not racist. So this is again, a very dangerous sign when these ideas, they're still calling the insurrection on January 6, the coup attempt, the directed aggression by Trump against Congress. Even among journalists and analysts that in general have a fairly good picture of things, to hear Finian Cunningham use these terms to describe what happened on January 6, it's disappointing because you get the sense that even some of the most critical thinkers out there who make a living in the alternative spheres of news are missing some crucial things!
So that tweet in particular is also really instructive I think and tells us how it's being used to bypass critical thinking and appeal to emotions because how can you argue with a writer who lost family to racists who were killed by guns?! How can you not have a certain amount of sympathy for her experience, for her history and want some kind of, if not revenge, then some kind of compensation. It's a lot like 'never again' among many Jewish people and the holocaust. At what cost is never again? Does that mean you're going to act aggressively, preemptively to everyone who you perceive to be a potential enemy on some level where you're going to effectively do to others what you are effectively doing to others? What you claim you want never done to yourselves? Is that the moral of the story? Is that the lesson learned?
Harrison: I don't know the numbers, I guess it would be a lot of people, how some people become racists. It's the same phenomenon as a blood feud or seeking revenge. You find this in ethnic conflicts all over the world as far back as I've been able to look in history where - what's a fictional country?
Adam: Durkistan.
Harrison: No, a Middle Earther. {laughter} Someone from Middle Earth kills your family, right? It's very natural to then, for that surviving family member to then hate all Middle Earthers, especially if there's been a conflict between Middle Earth and Upper Earth for generations, there will be an ethnic tension and you'll very easily see generalizations made. "Oh, those Middle Earthers. You see what they did to my family".
So hearing that story, what it sounds like is you have the same dynamic playing out but it was an evil southern racist gun owner and the dynamic is the same where there seems to then it's not too far to make the generalization that all southerner gun owners are murders and maybe even all southerners are potential murderers. It's very easy to make that generalization from a single example.
So an example like that might tug at the heart strings and it is a tragedy but it doesn't do anything, at least for me, to use that emotion to expand the category of people I should dislike for one reason or another. If an individual commits a crime, does something nasty, then I will have certain feelings and thoughts about that individual. That's pretty much where it ends. So, "Oh, you're worried about that individual? Well tell me about them. Let me form my thoughts, my opinions and my feelings about that person on that specific person." That bullshit doesn't work on me to try to get me to hate, dislike or support policies against any group of people just because of what one other person did. What did each individual in that group that you're talking about actually do?
Okay, agree, agree, disagree, agree but the analysis never approaches that because that requires some actual time and thought and energy as opposed to just, "All those people are evil."
Adam: That was something that Lobaczewski talks about a bit in Ponerology, the necessity for the understanding of the human condition and human nature because when you start to diverge from that understanding, humans are fallible and some individuals are just shitty people and some of them are really good. You find those two types of people and everything in between in every culture on the planet, forever and always. There will always be good people in this group and always be people who are malevolent in every other group. You can't just say all Middle Earthers are evil because it's not true. And you can't say the same about Upper Earthers either because, again, it's not true.
So we really have to...
Elan: Parse things out.
Adam: Yeah, parse things out and take a step back and make sure that we're not allowing ourselves to get manipulated into supporting things that aren't actually genuinely good or justified or justifiable.
Elan: You know what the darned irony of all of this is? I've mentioned this on the show previously. I'll start this way. Right now we're looking at a Biden administration that is a replay of...
Harrison: Biden/Harris administration.
Elan: Yes, thank you. {laughter} Get it right.
Harrison: Do better! {laughter} Do better Elan!
Adam: Build back better Elan. {laughter}
Elan: Yes. Well here it comes, okay? Mistakes or not, what we're looking at right now is the reconstitution of the Obama administration in part, a neo-liberal, neo-conservative, war hawking, aggressive regime change, coup-installing, overt aggression or overt aggressive kind of tool for hegemony and power projection across the entire world, be it soft power, be it military, you get the idea.
You have guys like James Clapper, former head of the NSA, who have gone on air to talk about how the Russians are subhuman and sneaky and untrustable! Right? You have it right out of the security establishment's MOUTH, that if it isn't white supremacy per se, it is a kind of real ultra pathological arrogance that IS a type of supremacy, that reflects a type of thinking that these individuals in the Biden administration agree with in their statements! It's all right there! Russia can't be trusted. Russia doesn't do well for its people. Russia is tyrannical. Russia doesn't have freedom and democracy. The purpose for these statements is to help make the case and justify the US's own aggression towards Russia.
You said a few moments ago Harrison, or maybe it was you Adam, that it's not sincere. Their accusations of white supremacy, their projection onto everyone else as this tool for locking people down and shutting them up and vilifying and demonizing them, of course it's not sincere, because they themselves are guilty in some sense, maybe not in a racial sense, maybe not in an as across-the-board a way as Clapper would seem to suggest in his statement that Russians are subhuman, but they are the ultimate white supremacists, for lack of a better term. They are the ultimate people who are trying to accrue power to themselves and use any tool with which to do it. And they're already guilty of it and they already plan to do a lot more. It's already in the works. They're chomping at the bit. They're drawing their plans. They're making their statements. They are signing executive orders.
We are going to see how wokeism as used by this current government, IS the ultimate camouflage for what is truly some really evil shit coming down the 'pike! When you put those two pieces together, I think that really, at least for me, solidifies the understanding of what this is about in some sense.
Adam: I really think as you're just saying there, we can just expect more accusations of domestic terrorism, more accusations of white supremacy, more accusations of sexism, all of these different accusations that have come out of the wokeism playbook. Just expect them to get thrown around more and more and to become less and less relevant to whatever it is that they're actually talking about. I think that's probably going to be the bigger thing.
Harrison: Yeah.
Adam: It's just going to become less and less relevant and more and more just a boldfaced lie and power grab.
Harrison: Transparently bullshit. {laughter}
Adam: Yeah. So do you guys have anything else you wanted to wrap up with?
Harrison: No, I think that was pretty well it.
Adam: Alright. Sounds good. We appreciate you guys listening in and tuning in and be sure to hit the like, subscribe. Hit the little notification bell and share it around the social media spheres. Y'all take care because this is going to get very, very interesting.
