"The Washington Post used DiAngelo and others to exacerbate racial hate and stoke the fires of a year long riot, equivalent in damage and death to a Category 2 Hurricane, and now that there’s no more money in wokeness they’re throwing DiAngelo out with the trash."
"The human instinct for avoiding confrontation is exploitable if you’re sufficiently willing to violate the social contract." - that might be the smartest thing WaPo has ever written.
Oh, and as for the notion that DiAngelo and others at the epicenter of "antiracism" are an unrepresentative "fringe", I'm reminded of an old quote of mine:
"QAnon is the right-wing version of the Democrat Party".
The "blob" is actually highly fractured. The way it achieves the minimal level of coherence it has is via what systems theorist Nassim Taleb called the Dictatorship of the Intolerant Minority.
The intolerant minority are mostly lunatics, sadists, narcissists and sociopaths.
They have been able to terrorize and bully the "center left" into conformity with racial extremism (and offers of Tammany Hall style patronage) for decades.
Ultimately it becomes so sociopathic and locked into its echo chamber that it goes into brain death, in Biden's case, literally.
The intellectual elites in that system, the professional-managerial class, are probably now suffering widespread brain rot from overuse of SSRIs for decades.
Not only does everyone have personal experience with how difficult it can be to change people's minds, but there's also empirical research showing why this is the case. A new study in Current Biology explains why some people seem to be constitutionally incapable of admitting they're wrong. The study shows the underlying mechanism behind being bull-headed, and there may be some ways to get better at recognizing when you're wrong.
...
cont. excerpts
New research published in Current Biology on December 18, 2018, confirms this feeling: people with radical beliefs actually think differently than those without. Specifically, radicals have less metacognitive sensitivity than moderates.
Metacognition refers to the ability to be aware of and analyze one’s own thinking. Metacognitive sensitivity is similar, but more specific: it refers to the ability to distinguish between one’s correct and incorrect judgements. The new paper, titled “Metacognitive Failure as a Feature of Holding Radical Beliefs,” shows that radicals have measurably less metacognitive sensitivity than moderates.
For those familiar with Wilber's integral theory and similar, such meta-cognition is a key feature of "Kegan stage 5", construct-aware meta-rationality. And that is required for the development of anti-fragility to techno-economic disruption under postmodern social conditions, which is the deeper problem (the dis-integration of hierarchies of curated expertise and the resulting meta-crisis).
World class evolutionary psychologists informally chat about the Metacrisis:
The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis: John Vervaeke Iain McGilchrist Daniel Schmachtenberger
Dec 19, 2023
This is a conversation between Iain McGilchrist, John Vervaeke and Daniel Schmachtenberger, recorded at Merton College, Oxford, in September 2023. With no planned objective or agenda, the discussion sought to outline the cognitive and spiritual components of the metacrisis. The metacrisis is the total ecosystem of all global crises and the common underlying dynamics that generate catastrophic and existential risks.
This is neither a comprehensive theory of the topic, nor an approach to addressing it. The conversation was simply an opportunity to explore in real time how the speakers, with their different worldviews and pre-existing frameworks, would approach this deep and challenging domain. As Iain, John and Daniel all happened to be in Oxford with availability on a single afternoon, they had not discussed or prepared the approach at any significant length in advance. As a result, a shared understanding emerges only towards the very end of the film. The content is incomplete and partial, and should be viewed as a potential entry point to a far deeper conversation (which may or may not be recorded at a later date). A complete transcript can be found here:
This movie was about 3 years too late to have a real impact/generate any real controversy. That’s because the Daily Wire didn’t have the courage to put their money and reputation on the line 3 years ago. Like most conservative slop merchants, they cross risky streets only after braver pioneers have already safely crossed or been clobbered by a bus (usually after a Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro has thrown them under it).
Agree. Same might be said of Bill Maher. He kept his "politically incorrect" head very low from 2016 to 2021 and only started saying antiwoke stuff after there were enough bodies on the cancellation pile that he could take cover behind it.
That's not exactly a fair or even remotely accurate take, especially when considering reality. To make films or anything media, it requires capital and lots of it. DW didn't even start its audio/video media portion until 2021, as evidenced by the reporting and facts. And, since you can't just spring something out of nothing, building capital to make the stuff you want, takes time. It's not that they didn't have the courage, it's more likely than not, they didn't have the funding to go after THIS particular topic, with other topics taking the forefront. Run Hide Fight was their first foray into the media space, IIRC. Never mind that any significant media endeavor takes a year or years to come to fruition, it's more likely than not, it took this long to get the movie produced, especially since just 3-4 years ago was when this particular subject was at its peak with the Summer of Love 2020. Is your expectation that they come out with a movie, with no funding (or funding that's prioritized to other things or dealing in a resource-constrained environment), all so they could... what? appease you? Holy smokes, talk about not having any legitimate expectations based in reality. Take a step back and realize, everything takes time and resources, a movie isn't a blog, it's not a meme, and it certainly isn't a blog reply. And, please explain who has highlighted the fringe element that's being mentioned in this article/blog, and done so with as much widespread recognition and acknowledgement (like being talked about in a major news outlet like WashPo)? I'll wait for a relevant response, but I don't there will be a cogent example provided, because that's WHY it's being discussed at WashPo, because it hasn't been addressed yet.
This movie is slop for conservative consumers and nothing more. DW has had the money and resources (i.e. $3M and a shoulder camera) to make it since at least 2019, but they made movies about girls with guns and men playing women’s sports instead. DEI is on its way out, not because of DW, but because it’s starting to really hurt bottom lines at big companies, especially big tech. Bezos is tired of DEI too, and is signaling to other companies that it’s ok to start rolling this stuff back now. That’s WHY it’s being talked about in WashPo.
It's a fair question, but while I have a lot of criticisms of Matt Walsh, I think the simple explanation is that he is more personally animated by transgender discourse.
Your comment is slop for I don't know who. The movie was perfectly timed for the election, but I don't know if Walsh has stated if that was intentional or not.
I didn't watch the whole movie, just some clips (on Walsh's facebook page), which were about DEI/woke assholes that were well known for a long time, and whose work had been debunked by numerous critics across the political rectum/spectrum by people of various "races".
There was never any shortage of criticisms of DEI/woke on the part of the "right" that Walsh represents. Controversies over insane, woke cargo cult zombies attacking Shapiro, Peterson and others (Bret Weinstein) went on for years, providing anyone with plenty of evidence that wokeism is mentally dysfunctional.
There has been a steady accumulation of deeper thinking on the "mean green meme" (pathological postmodern-left ideology such as woke/DEI) over many years, some of which HWFO has covered. There is now a small mountain of scholarship and independent journalism on the topic.
What Walsh did was brilliantly expose the insanity of wokeism for a more mainstream audience in ways that go beyond the usual right wing media take, which tends to be pretty shallow.
For people that are lucky enough to not have had personal interactions with woke lunatics, the movie is priceless.
I think giving Normies some better talking points can really help. There are so many people working for mid-tier law firms, tech, nursing, fitness, finance companies that have to take trainings steeped in these ideas who don't care to pay attention to the cutting edge of the culture war. Those people can benefit from something like this, and I think that's cool.
I'm most annoyed that it made me like Matt Walsh because he seems to be the exact same kind of culture war demagogue that he's criticizing. He might make good points about how silly Rao and DiAngelo are, but that doesn't mean his worldview any more accurate than theirs.
He is a conservative Catholic and a casual "populist" that can be funny at times and understands media production. His documentary style is hilarious, corny and surprisingly effective at exposing the complete shitshow that exists on the "woke" "left", in DEI programs, and so forth.
He has little or no interest in going beyond the obvious to his working and middle class "tribe": the secular left (as we know it, controlled opposition created by the CIA after WW2) is a failure because it is evil and incapable of recognizing the importance of renouncing sin to uphold social order.
The absurdity of the magnitude of "woke" idiocy and insanity became particularly vivid to mainstream folks when the DEI hire VP QueMala! lied about Biden's senility and a bunch of other stuff for years.
In heterodox circles there is still debate about how much more needs to be done to hack the cancerous gangrene of wokeism (ILLIBERAL, postmodernist/neo-communist totalitarianism and race grifting) and violent, psychotic radical leftism in general off the political and cultural body:
Millennials, zoomers, and elites remain firmly on the side of DEI and cancel culture
... the woke agenda is being championed by the Democratic Party—the political party that represents America’s establishment elites. Christopher Rufo has documented how, under the Biden/Harris administration, the “federal government not only punishes and rewards individuals based on racial identity but also has dispensed billions of dollars toward building a DEI regime spanning government, academia, medicine, and contracting.” Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic presidential nominee, is on video saying, “We have to stay woke, like everybody needs to be woke,” and then cackling. She released a campaign ad in which she explicitly endorsed the logic of wokism, asserting that “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.” There is no context that I’m leaving out. Harris literally says “everybody needs to be woke,” she understands this to mean that we will achieve equity when we have equal outcomes, and the Biden/Harris administration has already put this agenda into practice in countless ways. Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, has repeatedly claimed that there’s no First Amendment right to “misinformation” or “hate speech” (i.e., speech that wokesters dislike). Harris has overwhelming support from both the elites and young people. She leads Trump 3 to 2 among voters with postgraduate degrees and 2 to 1 among voters under the age of 30.
A couple weeks ago, the New York Times published an article, “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?,” with the subheading, “A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever.”
To be fair, the movie didn't lampoon Wilfred Reilly. It lampooned the "anti-racist" ideology by exposing it to Reilly's knowledge about hate crime hoaxes, which is a topic that Walsh has been very vocal about.
Dr. Reilly is himself sublimely hilarious on several levels, starting with the fact that it isn't obvious that he is "black". He then confounds all manner of woke nonsense with brilliant, down to earth thinking. He is a national treasure.
I saw the movie last night with family members who are too-online and their children. One of the adults thought it was the greatest thing ever and cheered when Thanos... I mean Robin DiAngelo was "got;" the other adult thought it was funny and was surprised at how much they enjoyed it; kids thought it was pretty funny and asked why the people in the movie were behaving so dumbly.
I think there is value in the movie for Normies who just happen to work at companies that make people do these silly, non-catastrophic-but-not-really-helpful DEI trainings. The screening was in one of the small 50-70 person theatres and it was full of mostly 30-60 year olds plus the two kids we brought. I think there is a huge appetite for pushback on silly things and I couldn't help but think of old Michael Moore documentaries which pointed out absurdities and how much we liked those.
The movie wasn't really *good*, but it was surprisingly funny. Some parts were a bit dull, as if they had extended a 60 minute, long-form youtube skit into a movie, but the meat of it was highly entertaining. I'm not that invested in the end of wokeness at this point, but it's still nice to see some of the bad actors get a bit of come-uppance for once.
There's something about a political documentary like this being "artistically true" but not entirely grounded in reality... it's like Michael Moore exposed some stupid crap, but he was also a political actor who was pushing a biased view of the subject matter. I feel similarly here. Walsh might just be the slightly-less-funny Moore of the now.
Nice article, btw! I really appreciate this point about Bandwagons. It's so annoying to constantly have to tell people that they're just on another bandwagon and maybe they should be careful about where this new one is headed.
Nice article, but I disagree with the WaPo (?) quote that said, “Second, that the human instinct for avoiding confrontation is exploitable if you’re sufficiently willing to violate the social contract.”
Grifters like DiAngelo et al did not take advantage of people being too polite to push back, they took advantage of a chickenshit public who were afraid to be called names that end in -ist or who have been too propagandized to know better. Major corporations happily gave away millions of dollars to these frauds and their non-profit organizations as a symbol for how down they were for the cause. Hell, even the Big Four (or is it now Three) accounting firms have consultants to help companies improve their DEI score. As I told Mrs. American Psycho, “It is all a big money grabbing scam. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.”
I guess it would depend on why one is avoiding confrontation. Is the individual simply trying to be polite as in “I disagree with the premise, but it’s not my place to rock the boat.” Or, is it a function of fear?
The quackery is so much worse than a movie can convey, but Walsh does a brilliant job. In the real world of public schools, so called Anti-Racist ideology is still doing grave harm as teachers are subjected to struggle sessions then teach children that all white people are inherently racist, among other dangerous absurdities. The grift is far from a harmless fad.
I mean I get the pendulum reference but we have evidence over the last couple hundred years that the overarching pendulum is still swinging in the direction away from individual freedom. Will that one ever see a reversal?
The overall freedom pendulum will continue to swing towards "less" until the dollar collapses, a bunch of politicians have very bad things happen to them, the country divides itself up into smaller more manageable pieces, and then each piece starts to build its own version of what it thinks freedom looks like.
Although not inevitable I think this scenario is a whole lot more likely to happen in 10-20 years than us being in essentially the same (but more broke) place we are today. The elites in our country still have no idea how much they have contributed to the delegitimization of the institutions they lead or prize, and where that naturally leads once a critical mass of the public has checked out on our present system being salvageable.
I generally assume that nothing ever happens, but I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll be looking at a fundamentally different political arrangement a decade from now.
The Boomers are the last generation holding onto some vestigial attachment to the old institutions. They’re fully illegitimate in the eyes of half of Gen X and Millennials, and basically all of Gen Z. I think the increasingly desperate attempts of those institutions to assert their legitimacy will only accelerate their demise.
The impending bankruptcy of entitlement programs will play a key role here. The decision will boil down to “let the dollar collapse” or “break the social contract in place for the last 100 years”. Either way, it’s going to lead to a critical mass of people giving up on the federal government.
Agree with everything you said. Although I am sure some of the elites recognize this and are planning accordingly, it still seems to me (possibly naively) that many are going to be caught almost entirely by surprise.
My husband, who I thought was more to the right than me, didn't like the movie. I didn't mind the humiliation of Di'Angelo, et al., but it wasn't as hilarious as Borat. Nevertheless, I'm glad someone did it. Di'Angelo seems to be heading into Rachel Dolezal territory with what appear to be lip injections and greasy-looking dark curls that hang limply around her face. Her eyes don't look right, either. Someone on X thought the people who didn't walk out on Walsh's DEI workshop when he brought out the whips were actors.
The Blob contains both "woke" insanity and the censorship-industrial-complex and Regime propaganda schemes. $Billions, yes, your taxpayer dollars, have slopped out of the corporate-state's trough to fund all of the insanity and do DEI hires of people with Grievance Studies degrees.
It does crack me up when Redditors claim Reddit is a right wing site. What, r/4chan and r/the_donald are the only large conservative subs on the site, and the former isn’t even pushing a political ideology.
I believe that the reason is because the vanguard still hasn't won.
The left has a pretty clear goal. Universal equality. But no matter how much power they get, they never get any closer to the goal. Because it's impossible.
So eventually if you are in the movement deep enough, for long enough, you must either admit the whole thing has been a waste of time, or start imagining enemies subverting you who are the real reason your power isn't enough.
I genuinely just believe Redditors are stupid. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen them post a link that literally doesn’t mention what they’re discussing, disproves what they’re arguing, or even just blatantly useless(example being the sample size for a national poll is like 200 people) to the discussion. Not to mention I think most of the site is literal bots or people who cannot think for themselves. Get in a discussion with a redditor communist, it’s the exact. same. words. Every time, no exception. “Texas outlawed pornhub” literally go read the legislation and pornhub’s response, literally not outlawed, where did they get that idea? Oh! Some media head said it. I’ve also heard them say the media is “blatantly right wing”, what? Mainstream media has Fox, who has been pretty hot/cold on Trump since he started campaigning 8+ years ago, and then it’s just a bunch of little ones like DW or whatever.
I think it’s really just the first idea but they double down. They know it’s fruitless but they can’t imagine to start agreeing with the people they’ve called demons for however long. It’s why all these polls on who is going to win are silly. Like, who is still on the fence at this point? You’re not going to switch to trump at this point just because Harris now said “I have an idea on how to fix inflation on groceries” or that she had no response to the proposal that her higher tax rate on the wealthy could get stopped in the houses. Who you’re voting for was decided like 2 years ago for most of the nation.
"The Washington Post used DiAngelo and others to exacerbate racial hate and stoke the fires of a year long riot, equivalent in damage and death to a Category 2 Hurricane, and now that there’s no more money in wokeness they’re throwing DiAngelo out with the trash."
Brutal.
I have to live up to the AI's impression of me. :)
She literally got caught in her own bullshit in that movie; so hilarious.
Paid a black man $30 bucks!!! WAOW
Fitting. Accurate. Justified. :D
"The human instinct for avoiding confrontation is exploitable if you’re sufficiently willing to violate the social contract." - that might be the smartest thing WaPo has ever written.
But of course, they lack introspection.
I loved the WaPo article. I thought it was fantastic. To have it come out of WaPo itself was just icing on the cake.
Oh, and as for the notion that DiAngelo and others at the epicenter of "antiracism" are an unrepresentative "fringe", I'm reminded of an old quote of mine:
"QAnon is the right-wing version of the Democrat Party".
Their "fringe" is all of them.
The Metacrisis ([pathological] postmodernism) is driven by social fragmentation and atomization:
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
The "blob" is actually highly fractured. The way it achieves the minimal level of coherence it has is via what systems theorist Nassim Taleb called the Dictatorship of the Intolerant Minority.
The intolerant minority are mostly lunatics, sadists, narcissists and sociopaths.
They have been able to terrorize and bully the "center left" into conformity with racial extremism (and offers of Tammany Hall style patronage) for decades.
Ultimately it becomes so sociopathic and locked into its echo chamber that it goes into brain death, in Biden's case, literally.
The intellectual elites in that system, the professional-managerial class, are probably now suffering widespread brain rot from overuse of SSRIs for decades.
The radical/extremist "left" lacks the capacity for meta-cognitive awareness.
Some purported psych research making your point:
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/radicals-are-worse-at-metacognition/
bigthink.com/neuropsych/radicals-are-worse-at-metacognition/
excerpt:
Neuropsych — February 15, 2019
Why radicals can’t recognize when they’re wrong
Key Takeaways
Not only does everyone have personal experience with how difficult it can be to change people's minds, but there's also empirical research showing why this is the case. A new study in Current Biology explains why some people seem to be constitutionally incapable of admitting they're wrong. The study shows the underlying mechanism behind being bull-headed, and there may be some ways to get better at recognizing when you're wrong.
...
cont. excerpts
New research published in Current Biology on December 18, 2018, confirms this feeling: people with radical beliefs actually think differently than those without. Specifically, radicals have less metacognitive sensitivity than moderates.
Metacognition refers to the ability to be aware of and analyze one’s own thinking. Metacognitive sensitivity is similar, but more specific: it refers to the ability to distinguish between one’s correct and incorrect judgements. The new paper, titled “Metacognitive Failure as a Feature of Holding Radical Beliefs,” shows that radicals have measurably less metacognitive sensitivity than moderates.
[ https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)31420-9 ]
For those familiar with Wilber's integral theory and similar, such meta-cognition is a key feature of "Kegan stage 5", construct-aware meta-rationality. And that is required for the development of anti-fragility to techno-economic disruption under postmodern social conditions, which is the deeper problem (the dis-integration of hierarchies of curated expertise and the resulting meta-crisis).
World class evolutionary psychologists informally chat about the Metacrisis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA5GV-XmwtM
www. youtube. com /watch?v=uA5GV-XmwtM
The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis: John Vervaeke Iain McGilchrist Daniel Schmachtenberger
Dec 19, 2023
This is a conversation between Iain McGilchrist, John Vervaeke and Daniel Schmachtenberger, recorded at Merton College, Oxford, in September 2023. With no planned objective or agenda, the discussion sought to outline the cognitive and spiritual components of the metacrisis. The metacrisis is the total ecosystem of all global crises and the common underlying dynamics that generate catastrophic and existential risks.
This is neither a comprehensive theory of the topic, nor an approach to addressing it. The conversation was simply an opportunity to explore in real time how the speakers, with their different worldviews and pre-existing frameworks, would approach this deep and challenging domain. As Iain, John and Daniel all happened to be in Oxford with availability on a single afternoon, they had not discussed or prepared the approach at any significant length in advance. As a result, a shared understanding emerges only towards the very end of the film. The content is incomplete and partial, and should be viewed as a potential entry point to a far deeper conversation (which may or may not be recorded at a later date). A complete transcript can be found here:
https://consilienceproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/TRANSCRIPT_-The-Psychological-Drivers-of-the-Metacrisis.pdf
consilienceproject. org /wp-content/uploads/2023/12/TRANSCRIPT_-The-Psychological-Drivers-of-the-Metacrisis.pdf
---
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/maybe-our-culture-is-literally-crazy/
www. theamericanconservative. com /maybe-our-culture-is-literally-crazy/
I have never heard any one say that word in over 20 years of my intelligible life!
This movie was about 3 years too late to have a real impact/generate any real controversy. That’s because the Daily Wire didn’t have the courage to put their money and reputation on the line 3 years ago. Like most conservative slop merchants, they cross risky streets only after braver pioneers have already safely crossed or been clobbered by a bus (usually after a Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro has thrown them under it).
Agree. Same might be said of Bill Maher. He kept his "politically incorrect" head very low from 2016 to 2021 and only started saying antiwoke stuff after there were enough bodies on the cancellation pile that he could take cover behind it.
That's not exactly a fair or even remotely accurate take, especially when considering reality. To make films or anything media, it requires capital and lots of it. DW didn't even start its audio/video media portion until 2021, as evidenced by the reporting and facts. And, since you can't just spring something out of nothing, building capital to make the stuff you want, takes time. It's not that they didn't have the courage, it's more likely than not, they didn't have the funding to go after THIS particular topic, with other topics taking the forefront. Run Hide Fight was their first foray into the media space, IIRC. Never mind that any significant media endeavor takes a year or years to come to fruition, it's more likely than not, it took this long to get the movie produced, especially since just 3-4 years ago was when this particular subject was at its peak with the Summer of Love 2020. Is your expectation that they come out with a movie, with no funding (or funding that's prioritized to other things or dealing in a resource-constrained environment), all so they could... what? appease you? Holy smokes, talk about not having any legitimate expectations based in reality. Take a step back and realize, everything takes time and resources, a movie isn't a blog, it's not a meme, and it certainly isn't a blog reply. And, please explain who has highlighted the fringe element that's being mentioned in this article/blog, and done so with as much widespread recognition and acknowledgement (like being talked about in a major news outlet like WashPo)? I'll wait for a relevant response, but I don't there will be a cogent example provided, because that's WHY it's being discussed at WashPo, because it hasn't been addressed yet.
This movie is slop for conservative consumers and nothing more. DW has had the money and resources (i.e. $3M and a shoulder camera) to make it since at least 2019, but they made movies about girls with guns and men playing women’s sports instead. DEI is on its way out, not because of DW, but because it’s starting to really hurt bottom lines at big companies, especially big tech. Bezos is tired of DEI too, and is signaling to other companies that it’s ok to start rolling this stuff back now. That’s WHY it’s being talked about in WashPo.
Wasn't he making "What is a Woman?" in 2019?
2022 was the release. Production/development likely the year or two prior. These things take considerable time...
I think so. When AIR? came out my first thought was, “Why wasn’t this one made first?”
It's a fair question, but while I have a lot of criticisms of Matt Walsh, I think the simple explanation is that he is more personally animated by transgender discourse.
Your comment is slop for I don't know who. The movie was perfectly timed for the election, but I don't know if Walsh has stated if that was intentional or not.
I didn't watch the whole movie, just some clips (on Walsh's facebook page), which were about DEI/woke assholes that were well known for a long time, and whose work had been debunked by numerous critics across the political rectum/spectrum by people of various "races".
There was never any shortage of criticisms of DEI/woke on the part of the "right" that Walsh represents. Controversies over insane, woke cargo cult zombies attacking Shapiro, Peterson and others (Bret Weinstein) went on for years, providing anyone with plenty of evidence that wokeism is mentally dysfunctional.
There has been a steady accumulation of deeper thinking on the "mean green meme" (pathological postmodern-left ideology such as woke/DEI) over many years, some of which HWFO has covered. There is now a small mountain of scholarship and independent journalism on the topic.
What Walsh did was brilliantly expose the insanity of wokeism for a more mainstream audience in ways that go beyond the usual right wing media take, which tends to be pretty shallow.
For people that are lucky enough to not have had personal interactions with woke lunatics, the movie is priceless.
I think giving Normies some better talking points can really help. There are so many people working for mid-tier law firms, tech, nursing, fitness, finance companies that have to take trainings steeped in these ideas who don't care to pay attention to the cutting edge of the culture war. Those people can benefit from something like this, and I think that's cool.
I'm most annoyed that it made me like Matt Walsh because he seems to be the exact same kind of culture war demagogue that he's criticizing. He might make good points about how silly Rao and DiAngelo are, but that doesn't mean his worldview any more accurate than theirs.
He is a conservative Catholic and a casual "populist" that can be funny at times and understands media production. His documentary style is hilarious, corny and surprisingly effective at exposing the complete shitshow that exists on the "woke" "left", in DEI programs, and so forth.
He has little or no interest in going beyond the obvious to his working and middle class "tribe": the secular left (as we know it, controlled opposition created by the CIA after WW2) is a failure because it is evil and incapable of recognizing the importance of renouncing sin to uphold social order.
The absurdity of the magnitude of "woke" idiocy and insanity became particularly vivid to mainstream folks when the DEI hire VP QueMala! lied about Biden's senility and a bunch of other stuff for years.
In heterodox circles there is still debate about how much more needs to be done to hack the cancerous gangrene of wokeism (ILLIBERAL, postmodernist/neo-communist totalitarianism and race grifting) and violent, psychotic radical leftism in general off the political and cultural body:
https://ncofnas.com/p/wokism-is-just-beginning
ncofnas. com /p/wokism-is-just-beginning
excerpts:
Millennials, zoomers, and elites remain firmly on the side of DEI and cancel culture
... the woke agenda is being championed by the Democratic Party—the political party that represents America’s establishment elites. Christopher Rufo has documented how, under the Biden/Harris administration, the “federal government not only punishes and rewards individuals based on racial identity but also has dispensed billions of dollars toward building a DEI regime spanning government, academia, medicine, and contracting.” Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic presidential nominee, is on video saying, “We have to stay woke, like everybody needs to be woke,” and then cackling. She released a campaign ad in which she explicitly endorsed the logic of wokism, asserting that “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.” There is no context that I’m leaving out. Harris literally says “everybody needs to be woke,” she understands this to mean that we will achieve equity when we have equal outcomes, and the Biden/Harris administration has already put this agenda into practice in countless ways. Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, has repeatedly claimed that there’s no First Amendment right to “misinformation” or “hate speech” (i.e., speech that wokesters dislike). Harris has overwhelming support from both the elites and young people. She leads Trump 3 to 2 among voters with postgraduate degrees and 2 to 1 among voters under the age of 30.
A couple weeks ago, the New York Times published an article, “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?,” with the subheading, “A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever.”
...
You are probably right, I still laughed though.
To be fair, the movie didn't lampoon Wilfred Reilly. It lampooned the "anti-racist" ideology by exposing it to Reilly's knowledge about hate crime hoaxes, which is a topic that Walsh has been very vocal about.
Yes.
Dr. Reilly is himself sublimely hilarious on several levels, starting with the fact that it isn't obvious that he is "black". He then confounds all manner of woke nonsense with brilliant, down to earth thinking. He is a national treasure.
I saw the movie last night with family members who are too-online and their children. One of the adults thought it was the greatest thing ever and cheered when Thanos... I mean Robin DiAngelo was "got;" the other adult thought it was funny and was surprised at how much they enjoyed it; kids thought it was pretty funny and asked why the people in the movie were behaving so dumbly.
I think there is value in the movie for Normies who just happen to work at companies that make people do these silly, non-catastrophic-but-not-really-helpful DEI trainings. The screening was in one of the small 50-70 person theatres and it was full of mostly 30-60 year olds plus the two kids we brought. I think there is a huge appetite for pushback on silly things and I couldn't help but think of old Michael Moore documentaries which pointed out absurdities and how much we liked those.
The movie wasn't really *good*, but it was surprisingly funny. Some parts were a bit dull, as if they had extended a 60 minute, long-form youtube skit into a movie, but the meat of it was highly entertaining. I'm not that invested in the end of wokeness at this point, but it's still nice to see some of the bad actors get a bit of come-uppance for once.
There's something about a political documentary like this being "artistically true" but not entirely grounded in reality... it's like Michael Moore exposed some stupid crap, but he was also a political actor who was pushing a biased view of the subject matter. I feel similarly here. Walsh might just be the slightly-less-funny Moore of the now.
Nice article, btw! I really appreciate this point about Bandwagons. It's so annoying to constantly have to tell people that they're just on another bandwagon and maybe they should be careful about where this new one is headed.
And most importantly, it showed the amount of grift there is in believing " No justice, no peace "; right????
So what should do? Interested to know the correct position.
This is an in-depth exploration of the topic informed by systems theory, tantric Buddhism and evolutionary psychology.
metarationality.com
(The author, David Chapman is a MIT trained PhD in AI and a software developer.)
This is a pretty good summary:
How to stop the destruction of civilization.
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
Well said Freakout.
Nice article, but I disagree with the WaPo (?) quote that said, “Second, that the human instinct for avoiding confrontation is exploitable if you’re sufficiently willing to violate the social contract.”
Grifters like DiAngelo et al did not take advantage of people being too polite to push back, they took advantage of a chickenshit public who were afraid to be called names that end in -ist or who have been too propagandized to know better. Major corporations happily gave away millions of dollars to these frauds and their non-profit organizations as a symbol for how down they were for the cause. Hell, even the Big Four (or is it now Three) accounting firms have consultants to help companies improve their DEI score. As I told Mrs. American Psycho, “It is all a big money grabbing scam. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.”
"afraid to be called names" is the same psychology as "afraid to push back."
I guess it would depend on why one is avoiding confrontation. Is the individual simply trying to be polite as in “I disagree with the premise, but it’s not my place to rock the boat.” Or, is it a function of fear?
The quackery is so much worse than a movie can convey, but Walsh does a brilliant job. In the real world of public schools, so called Anti-Racist ideology is still doing grave harm as teachers are subjected to struggle sessions then teach children that all white people are inherently racist, among other dangerous absurdities. The grift is far from a harmless fad.
Thank you. So tired of opinions from 5 miles high. Real damage is being done.
This conference is being pushed by school administrators. The keynote speaker wrote "This Book Is Anti-Racist" which we know is doublespeak.
https://www.collaborative.org/event/transforming-education-for-social-justice-conference-bridging-belonging-civic-engagement/
I mean I get the pendulum reference but we have evidence over the last couple hundred years that the overarching pendulum is still swinging in the direction away from individual freedom. Will that one ever see a reversal?
The overall freedom pendulum will continue to swing towards "less" until the dollar collapses, a bunch of politicians have very bad things happen to them, the country divides itself up into smaller more manageable pieces, and then each piece starts to build its own version of what it thinks freedom looks like.
Although not inevitable I think this scenario is a whole lot more likely to happen in 10-20 years than us being in essentially the same (but more broke) place we are today. The elites in our country still have no idea how much they have contributed to the delegitimization of the institutions they lead or prize, and where that naturally leads once a critical mass of the public has checked out on our present system being salvageable.
I generally assume that nothing ever happens, but I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll be looking at a fundamentally different political arrangement a decade from now.
The Boomers are the last generation holding onto some vestigial attachment to the old institutions. They’re fully illegitimate in the eyes of half of Gen X and Millennials, and basically all of Gen Z. I think the increasingly desperate attempts of those institutions to assert their legitimacy will only accelerate their demise.
The impending bankruptcy of entitlement programs will play a key role here. The decision will boil down to “let the dollar collapse” or “break the social contract in place for the last 100 years”. Either way, it’s going to lead to a critical mass of people giving up on the federal government.
Agree with everything you said. Although I am sure some of the elites recognize this and are planning accordingly, it still seems to me (possibly naively) that many are going to be caught almost entirely by surprise.
Lol, You Hope Too Much. Why would that ever happen when it can just Get Worse Forever and then Israel Nukes The World?
Ashes and Echoes
My husband, who I thought was more to the right than me, didn't like the movie. I didn't mind the humiliation of Di'Angelo, et al., but it wasn't as hilarious as Borat. Nevertheless, I'm glad someone did it. Di'Angelo seems to be heading into Rachel Dolezal territory with what appear to be lip injections and greasy-looking dark curls that hang limply around her face. Her eyes don't look right, either. Someone on X thought the people who didn't walk out on Walsh's DEI workshop when he brought out the whips were actors.
Did "Spinal Tap" cause it, or just reflected that the high point of the make-up and codpiece wearing heavy metal bands had already occurred?
Had me up until mentioning the Reich. That's one tired horse.
Agree.
🙃🙃🙃🤗🤗🤗😘😘😘😍😍😍🥰🥰🥰
The Blob contains both "woke" insanity and the censorship-industrial-complex and Regime propaganda schemes. $Billions, yes, your taxpayer dollars, have slopped out of the corporate-state's trough to fund all of the insanity and do DEI hires of people with Grievance Studies degrees.
If you are part of the vanguard, you never thought you could hide behind the media.
Radical leftists believe the media is all right wing. This is actually pretty easy to find out if you pay any attention to what they say.
It does crack me up when Redditors claim Reddit is a right wing site. What, r/4chan and r/the_donald are the only large conservative subs on the site, and the former isn’t even pushing a political ideology.
I believe that the reason is because the vanguard still hasn't won.
The left has a pretty clear goal. Universal equality. But no matter how much power they get, they never get any closer to the goal. Because it's impossible.
So eventually if you are in the movement deep enough, for long enough, you must either admit the whole thing has been a waste of time, or start imagining enemies subverting you who are the real reason your power isn't enough.
I genuinely just believe Redditors are stupid. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen them post a link that literally doesn’t mention what they’re discussing, disproves what they’re arguing, or even just blatantly useless(example being the sample size for a national poll is like 200 people) to the discussion. Not to mention I think most of the site is literal bots or people who cannot think for themselves. Get in a discussion with a redditor communist, it’s the exact. same. words. Every time, no exception. “Texas outlawed pornhub” literally go read the legislation and pornhub’s response, literally not outlawed, where did they get that idea? Oh! Some media head said it. I’ve also heard them say the media is “blatantly right wing”, what? Mainstream media has Fox, who has been pretty hot/cold on Trump since he started campaigning 8+ years ago, and then it’s just a bunch of little ones like DW or whatever.
I think it’s really just the first idea but they double down. They know it’s fruitless but they can’t imagine to start agreeing with the people they’ve called demons for however long. It’s why all these polls on who is going to win are silly. Like, who is still on the fence at this point? You’re not going to switch to trump at this point just because Harris now said “I have an idea on how to fix inflation on groceries” or that she had no response to the proposal that her higher tax rate on the wealthy could get stopped in the houses. Who you’re voting for was decided like 2 years ago for most of the nation.
Good stuff as always.