The World of Woke

“To everyone celebrating the 50 UN cowards that walked out on the Benjamin Netanyahu speech. I remind you that when you turn on the light, the roaches always scatter.” —Pastor Greg Locke 

By Robin Itzler

Editor's Note:  This is a commentary in Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors.  If you wish to get the full edition, E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free. RK 

Wikipedia is Wokepedia

Conservatives who use Wikipedia are often angered when the left-leaning site spews obvious lies. It didn’t start that way, but that’s how it is today. For instance, Wikipedia has described Charlie Kirk as “divisive, racist, xenophobic, and extreme.” The Daily Mail quotes Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger calling the platform “completely corrupted by Woke ideology.” Using AI, Elon Musk plans to provide an honest source of public information called Grokipedia. (Ah, the benefits of having a $500 BILLION net worth!)

NFL—Conservatives could stop this madness

The NFL knows they could have a Nazi marching band, and millions of Americans (including millions of CONSERVATIVES) will still watch the Super Bowl. Oh yeah, Conservatives say, "I turn the sound off during the halftime show." Keep the sound on or off, It does not matter to the NFL - your TV is on, and you are watching the Super Bowl, even if ignoring the halftime craziness.

What others are saying:

President Donald Trump—speaking to Greg Kelly on Newsmax “I don’t know who he is, I don’t know why they’re doing it — it’s, like, crazy. They blame it on some promoter they hired to pick up entertainment. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous.”

Mike Johnson, Republican Speaker of the House—interview “I didn’t even know who Bad Bunny was, OK, but it sounds like a terrible decision in my view. Well, it sounds like he’s not someone who appeals to a broader audience. And I think — you know, there’s so many eyes on the Super Bowl, a lot of young impressionable children, and I think, in my view, you would have Lee Greenwood — or role models — doing that, not somebody like this.”

Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio—interview “The NFL made a decision that was clearly partisan. Why else would you pick, you know, some second-rate musician to play in our greatest sporting event? It makes no sense whatsoever. I thought the guy’s Saturday Night Live appearance was insulting to the country.”

NFL Hall of Famer Eric Dickerson, ex-Rams tailback (about Bad Bunny’s anti-American comments) - reported in New York Post “I’m from the US. I love my country. And if you don’t like the United States, just get your ass out of here and don’t come over here. I know Puerto Rico is part of the US. But it’s not the US. That’s the way I look at it. That’s the way I feel.”

The ONLY way the NFL will give a damn about the United States of America is when CONSERVATIVES refuse to attend the Super Bowl game and refuse to watch the Super Bowl on television. Until that happens, it is a waste of time to howl about the lunatic who will be the star of the 2026 halftime program.

The Super Bowl proves that often times Conservatives talk a big game (pun intended) but only walk the walk when it is easy to follow through. For instance, it is easy to switch beers (Budweiser), or shop at a different store (Target), or eat at a different restaurant. It's not so easy to skip the Super Bowl.

To share your thoughts with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodall:

Email: support@nfl.com Phone: 800-635-5300 Write: 345 Park Ave, New York, NY 10154

The Disappearance of Male Authors

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Standing in line at a Target, I glanced at the books for sale. Every work of fiction, with the exception of those two elderly stalwarts, James Patterson and Stephen King, came from a female author. While older male writers still have a large presence on bestseller lists and in the book world, newly published male fiction authors have become rarer than blue moons.

This phenomenon reported on in stories like NPR’s “Women Now Dominate the Book Business” and “Women Are Now Publishing More Books Than Men” (which describe it as a sign of progress) helps shed light on another phenomenon that the media has been rubbing its head over in articles like The Atlantic’s “How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time” and Psychology Today’s “Why Aren’t College Students Reading?”

There is a generational decline in reading across Gen Z, but it’s also a gender divide. While there’s always been a gender reading gap, by 2018, 44% of girls loved to read, while only 24% of boys did. One study found that adult women were reading 39% more than men did.

Publishers may argue that there is a chicken and egg phenomenon. Men read fewer books and so publishers take fewer books by male authors with male characters that are aimed at male audiences. Readers and editors become almost universally female. And men disappear.

But did men stop reading for some mysterious reasons or because publishers excluded them?

The bestseller lists are now packed with fiction novels whose readership is 81% female. The remaining, mostly older, male fiction authors are following suit by jettisoning male protagonists and writing books aimed at female readers leaving a marketplace with few male characters.

Women and men are different and there’s nothing wrong with a segmented marketplace in which everyone reads what appeals to them, but there is something deeply wrong when male authors and protagonists, along with readers, disappear from the culture.

How did we get here?

78% of staffers and 59% executives in the publishing industry are female. Much like their male counterparts in the past, they order books that suit their tastes. But where male editors in the past understood that they also needed female customers, the publishing industry has all but written off the male sex. And that’s because it isn’t just female: publishing is very woke.

Wokeness treats the disappearance of men in publishing as a triumph of diversity.

It also ensures that the vast majority of books, whatever the sex of the author or the readership, are woke. Diversity, representation and woke messaging now drive much of publishing. And men, who are more likely to be conservative, are no longer reading or buying books.

Diversity surveys celebrate a publishing monoculture composed of woke white women living in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but that monoculture is hollowing out the larger culture of reading. Gen Z is the most affected because it has the least awareness of books that existed in the past and is the most exposed to current publishing trends through pop culture, schools and libraries.

And the numbers show quite clearly that Gen Z boys and men are opting out of today’s books.

You don’t have to be Gen Z to spot the problem. It’s been years since I’ve checked a book out of the library or bought a new copy of one in a chain bookstore. Or even set foot in one. After decades of making bookstores like Strand and Barnes & Noble a second home, I have no interest in navigating through displays of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the 1619 Project, woke outbursts, apologetics for Hamas, calls for destroying America and sexual fetish celebrations.

And the fiction sections have become no better.

The vast majority of books I read today were published before 2006. Gen Z is less likely to have that option. Gen Z boys grow up with educational books that unsubtly scold them for being white men, advance girls as leaders, and humiliate stand-ins for their race and sex at every turn. By the time that they’re ready for YA books, they’ve already checked out and are no longer reading.

But this same woke publishing marketplace does girls no favors. By the time they reach college, they may be ‘reading’ regularly, but the YA safe space materials they’re ‘reading’ leaves them unprepared for serious literature. In college, they demand trigger warnings and can’t cope with books whose purpose is exploring larger philosophical questions or the human experience rather than narcissistically pandering to their manufactured politics, identities and complaints.

And so colleges introduce trigger warnings and replace Shakespeare with Audre Lorde.

A woke publishing industry has trained Gen Z men not to read because of identity politics and Gen Z women have been trained to only read for identity politics. Or as the industry calls it “representation”. Gen Z women arrive in college complaining that too many of the characters in Shakespeare are “white cis men” and they don’t feel represented. Meanwhile their male counterparts are not reading because they actually don’t see representation in today’s market.

And so college students come to college unable to read a book.

Publishing, like every business, worked best when it pursued the market rather than the politics. When politics defines the market, as it invariably does in culture industries, a small wealthy woke demographic controls the market, which caters to its every whim, while alienating everyone else. A small fanatically loyal base with lots of spending money can be profitable in the short run, especially in culture industries, but it hollows out the industry in the long run.

Reading, unlike music, TV and film, is a more difficult habit to start and an easier habit to drop. The competition of constant smartphone browsing, often blamed for a decline in reading books, creates an easy substitute, and so once readers disappear, they may never come back.

I have spoken to plenty of men whose reading has sharply dropped off. Those who read, often tend to read articles, biographies and classics, but rarely any new books and even more rarely new fiction. And while the classics are great, a literate society produces new works or it dies.

Literature is disappearing before our eyes. And though it may not be obvious now, our culture will have good reason to regret its passing.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading. 

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left tells the untold story of the Left's 200-Year War against America. And readers love it.

Is Everything Really Political?

Don’t like wokeness? What do you have to hide?

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Wokes interrogate critics of wokeness by asking what it is that wokeness has inhibited them from doing. The implication is that they want to do bad things, like shout racial slurs, and would be doing it right now even if it wasn’t for wokeness. To be a leftist is to see the world as being in a state of fundamental conflict between opposing forces. Leftist politics, violent or non-violent, totalitarian or libertarian, become the only hope of redemption for mankind from the forces of capitalism, nationalism, the patriarchy, and whatever other evils are added to the menu.

This battle for the human soul requires the total triumph of the Left over everything else. And thus also total control over everyone and everything to root out all these many human evils.

What wokes see as liberation, critics of wokeness see as total tyranny.

To understand why these two groups see wokeness so differently requires also understanding the leftist mentality and the concept of wokeness. To be ‘woke’ or aware is to see the entire world as political. While to oppose wokeness is to see wokes imposing politics on everything.

Critics of wokeness protest politicization while wokes insist that everything is already political.

This premise lies at the heart of leftist politics and also the opposition to it by apolitical people who may not be conservative or have any political agenda of their own except being free.

Leftism is a giant conspiracy theory. Its paranoid schizophrenic view of the world is not unique. The perception that the world is invisibly controlled by forces and agendas that most people are not aware of pervades many cults, conspiracy theorists and radical movements. But what is unique about the Left is its image as an intellectual movement and a cultural force that has enabled its paranoid worldview and its raving hostility to the world as it exists to dominate the discourse at the expense of the ideas, beliefs and cultures that predated it.

The central leftist conspiracy theory is wrapped in academic theories taught in every university, and its premises are as deeply embedded in our culture as they were in the USSR and much of the western world, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, has come to see at least some of reality through the lens of leftist conspiracy theories and to echo its messages.

Wokeness is the act of ‘awakening’ people to that alternate reality by imposing that lens.

Leftism is a way of seeing the world and a moral system about how the world should be. This morality is premised on seeing invisible systems of power, whether it’s capitalism or systemic racism, that it defines and seeks to dismantle to make way for its new moral order to take over.

Freedom is incompatible with that worldview. Leftism assumes that the vast majority of people have been incorporated into systems, ideologies and ways of being that they have to unlearn or be forced to unlearn. Under the impetus of identity politics, leftists may concede that some ‘indigenous peoples’ untainted by western capitalism might be pure enough to function on their own without a ‘wokening’ being imposed on them, but most of us will have to be ‘untaught.’

And the unlearning of the old and the awakening to the new is a repetitive process that requires constant monitoring to avoid backsliding. Individualism is subsumed by collective monitoring. Workplaces, schools and eventually all of society become a giant panopticon where activists seek out errors and sins to punish through public humiliation, financial loss and even violence.

The more intensive wokeness gets, the more extreme its activists become in monitoring everyone’s habits, associations and speech. And this is what most people view as ‘wokeness’ and come out against. They see wokeness not as leftist politics, but as being monitored and forced to be afraid and to censor themselves because of the total politicisation of everything.

Much like Communism, wokes argue that freedom might one day be realizable, but not until everything bad has been unlearned and everything good has been taught. And since the Left keeps generating new evils to unlearn, like heterosexuality and cis’ness, the final unlearning and the embrace of true wokeness or Communism is an event that can never actually arrive..

Since everything is political and since everything not fully woke is evil, everything must be destroyed. The habit of seeing the world through a lens of leftist conspiracy theories, and identifying more things to destroy as part of the larger goal of justifying the destruction of everything becomes the fundamental intellectual and cultural activity of leftist wokeness.

This system of deconstruction that defines impossible utopian ideals against the worldly evils that it identifies is the political engine of the machine. Its purpose is not so much to find new things to celebrate, like transgenderism, as to use them to wage war on old things. New things are of no use unless they are destroying the old and then they too must be destroyed.

Opponents of wokeness come to see this as a totalitarian assault on their freedom and their individuality. What begins as a war against systems quickly becomes a war on individuals. Dismantling ‘isms’ stops being just about waging war on institutions and boils down to waging war on individuals. The war on capitalism or the patriarchy isn’t out there, it’s inside you.

There is no freedom without individualism. And there is no individualism when everything is politicised. The backlash to wokeness is a backlash against that tyranny of conformity.

Wokes view any resistance to wokeness as immoral. Cancel culture they argue is just consequences culture. Individualism doesn’t exist. The people who claim to be individuals are just complicit in the systems such as capitalism or colonialism that they seek to preserve.

Wokeness claims to be pursuing liberation through tyranny which it can only justify by claiming that its tyranny is saving people from a much worse invisible tyranny all around them. And if they don’t feel saved, that’s because they’ve become complicit in that tyranny. And need to ‘check their privilege’ and ‘decenter’ themselves. And thus freedom becomes slavery.

And slavery becomes freedom.

Wokeness is not a temporary phenomenon, under its varied names it’s the inevitable next stage of leftist politics which begin with promises of utopia and end with a tyrannical dystopia.

Most people don’t recognize the nuances of leftist politics let alone understand that behind the grab bag of causes, some seemingly random, solar panels, Gaza, drag queens, is a larger operating modality, but they know when they are being threatened and intimidated.

Leftist policies seem good to people when they offer financial benefits, like free healthcare, or feelings of heroism, like civil rights, without looking into the details, but the package deal is that the integrated whole is a machine built to destroy everything they love and care about. Underneath the smiles and buzzwords is a paranoid hostility to people as they are and a worldview trained to see the bad in everything old and the good in everything new it does.

Wokeness is the transition from leftism as an economic and social benefit to a mandatory worldview. And it is here that people wake up and realize that it’s not freedom: it’s slavery.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left tells the untold story of the Left's 200-Year War against America. And readers love it.

May the Force of Woke Be With You!

Time and truth are on the same side, and getting Woke is socially, culturally, and  economically antithetical to both.

By Robin Itzler

Editor's Note:  This is one of the commentaries selected from Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors. Any cartoons appearing will have been added by me.  If you wish to get the full edition, E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free. RK 

If we told you that 100 percent of Netflix employees donate to the Democrat party, would you be surprised? Of course, not! But what if we told you that 99 percent of NEWS CORP employees donate to the Democrat party? News Corp is the parent company of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.  That's the reporting from Quiver Quantitative (through August 8) as reported in Conservative Playbook.

Ford, Built Woke Tough:

Maybe not Ford Motor Company has announced that it is abandoning its woke agenda and focusing on its core business (duh!) While Ford wants to move Americans into one of their cars, they are moving away from ridiculous DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives or supporting pride events. Ford announced earlier in the year that they would no longer participate in the LGBTQ+ alphabet Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index survey.

To share your thoughts with Ford CEO Jim Farley: Email: media@ford.com, Phone: 800-392-3673, Write: P. O. Box 6248, Dearborn, MI 48126

Coors Beer: 

DEI can drown its sorrows in the beer Canadian-American multinational drink and brewing company Molson Coors, makers of popular Coors beers, announced they are abandoning DEI trainings and getting rid of defined supplier diversity goals. Coors will no longer participate in the LGBTQ+ alphabet Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index survey. The employee memo included: 

“We are ensuring our executive incentives are tied to business performance and do not include aspirational representation goals beginning next year.”

(Duh!)

Probably trying to make the left happy, Coors said they are scrapping their DEI trainings since all employees have taken the program. That makes no sense since the company is going to be hiring new employees.

To share your thoughts with Molson Coors CEO Gavin Hattersley: Click Here to Email, Phone: 800-645-5376,  Write: 250 S Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60606

Who Will Man the Walls?

A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.  The abandoned Honor Code of West Point.

By Rich Kozlovich 

I originally published this on September 5, 2022.  Given the total disintegration of values in the Democrat party with its complete capitulation to leftist insanity, and the total corruption of of all the Departments and agencies of the federal government, it still resonates.  If a republic collapses, can it ever right itself again?  

“This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can’t be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won’t be done. The Founders’ Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.” - Mike Vanderboegh 

Enjoy.

I subscribe to the non-paid version of Common Sense with Bari Weiss, and some it's pretty good, some of it's liberal, but it's worth a look or two on occasion.  Weiss resigned as an editor from the New York Times because as liberal as she was, and is, she just wasn't Woke.  And if you're sane, at some point, you can't possibly be Woke enough to avoid the outraged criticism from the most extreme elements of that human plague, that Temple of the Church of Wokeness, Twitter!  

There are no boundaries on the left, and outrage expressed by one insane Wokester on Twitter can destroy a leftist's career.   Real conservatives who are attacked kind of smile, snort and move on for two reasons.  An attack by these loons is a point of honor and evidence they must be doing something right.  And real conservatives totally understand there's no appeasing these misfits, which is why the left keeps getting more radical and the right appears to become more conservative.   

One of the articles that appeared in Common Sense that I thought was worth some time was, The Origins of Woke, with the subtitle, A forgotten satirical book form the nineties predicted cancel culture, by Phoebe Maltz Bovy saying: 

The front cover of the dictionary shows a man, a woman, and a dog, each affixed with labels such as “hair disadvantaged” (he’s balding), “woman of noncolor” (she’s white), and “nonhuman animal companion” (it’s a shaggy dog). None of them, though especially the woman and the dog, would be out of place in a 2022 farmers market. (Again: cyclical fashions.)

The back cover bears a warning: “Be sensitive or else!,” with the follow-up, “Welcome to the nineties. But you better watch what you say. If you’re not politically correct, not even your pet—oops, your animal companion—will love you anymore.”

 Beard’s author bio begins, “Although Henry Beard is a typical product of elitist educational institutions and a beneficiary of a number of negative action programs, he has struggled to overcome his many severe privileges.” And Cerf’s: “Christopher Cerf is a melanin-impoverished, temporarily abled, straight, half-Anglo-, half-Jewish-American male.” 

Privilege disclaimers in the early 1990s! I had to have it.

Her conclusion is that wokeness is political correctness, and political correctness is wokeness which I think is a bit of a duh!  However it demonstrates the fact the left is like rust, it never sleeps, always changing the same old nostrums in ways to make them look new and enticing, and have been doing this forever. 

Kevin Freeman writes this is part of the plan that has been decades in the making.  A plan "to take down the greatest obstacle to totalitarianism the world has ever known: the United States of America."  He makes the point these leftist "elites are neither incompetent nor insane. They are evil, and they are freedom’s enemies." While I agree this is their plan, and has always been their plan, I disagree about their competence or their sanity. No rational competent person could possibly subscribe to such insanity.  They're just evil. 

The reason I said the right "appears" to be more conservative is because the left keeps getting more and more openly radical, so even if conservatives are merely standing still they automatically appear more conservative and moving more to the right.  But real conservatives who steadfastly defied the left for decades are already "the right", and can go no further because conservatism, unlike leftism, has boundaries, it's just that more people are joining them there.  In principle conservatives believe it's fundamental that society must not "lie, steal, cheat or tolerate those who do".  I'll tell you what.  We'll come back to that.

Clarity can only be achieved through definition, which Stephan Helgesen does very well in his article, The Rise of the Unprincipled Left, saying:

 Let's start with traditional conservatives.  By traditional, I am referring to a set of values that have transcended many generations.  Some of them are love of country, respect for authority and the rule of law, trust in our institutions, belief in personal accountability, fidelity to our Constitution and Bill of Rights, trust in our courts (and juries) to fairly adjudicate the cases before them and mete out appropriate punishment to the guilty, confidence in our schools and teachers to educate our children passionately but objectively, respect for our military service members and law enforcement organizations for the dangerous jobs they do, and many more, not the least of which are found in the Christian Ten Commandments.

In the past, those core values have been the touchstone we would go to when we were wrestling with a thorny question.  Would our opinion track with our basic values?  In short, could we look at ourselves in the mirror and say, "Yes, that is my belief, and I will defend it because I am a principled person"?

Now the left:

The left's world is dominated by, as I've stated, a belief in situational dependency coupled with might makes right.  Leftists eschew actual democracy and fear free speech.  They see the forced imposition of their cultural views as a holy crusade, and if anyone dares question that crusade's legitimacy, he is summarily banned, doxxed, de-platformed, ostracized from polite society, vilified, and fired from his job — or accused of being a white supremacists, misogynist, homophobe, right-wing extremist, or domestic terrorist.  Leftists have no qualms about offering up the names of the "opposition" to the media and to municipal, state, or federal authorities for later prosecution or persecution.

The left is unprincipled, period!  It is now, it has always been, and it will always be unprincipled because principles require a stable moral foundation, a touchstone for what we do, what we think and what we work to bring into being.  

The only morality of the left is a morality of the moment.  A morality that can and will shift as the need arises.  They are the "ultimate carpetbaggers — unscrupulous opportunists who would betray anyone and anything to feather their own nests".  And that means do anything to take and hold power over the masses, no matter who has to be sacrificed, and since the French Revolution they've sacrificed over millions of people.  The American left was able to hide who and what they are better in the past. No longer. 

Their claims of "defending our democracy" is a clever rhetorical ruse since they clearly hate "our Republic", which they unendingly work to undermine and ultimately eliminate by destroying the foundation of America's Democratic Republic.  The Constitution.  

We saw that during the false covid pandemic where societies went along with these ridiculous mandates, much of which was imposed by unelected bureaucrats.  These sheep then turned on those who saw these mandates for what they were and refused to bend the knee to this power grab, dehumanizing them and smugly, arrogantly and self righteously approved of granting unconstitutional powers to police which allowed them to abuse the unmasked and unvaccinated.   

This wasn't accidental.  It was deliberate, it was unconstitutional, "it was planned" and it was implemented to impose tyranny on America.  It's time we get that's part of "the plan".  It's time for those who see these things for what they are to have the courage to stand and be counted, no matter how many slings and arrows are flung in their direction.

The cadets of West Point were referred to as that Long Gray Line.   A Long Gray Line that once had an adhered to, and respected, "Honor Code" that said "A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do", with the motto "Duty, Honor, Country", creating an "unchanging path of discipline needed by an individual to follow" and "to lead with character, abide by the Honor Code, and live above the common level of life in order to be leaders of the nation."  

But when society has eschewed the concept of honor that lack is transmitted into every field of endeavor, including West Point, which was demonstrated with the cheating scandal at West Point and how the administration at West Point watered down that code in the way they handled it.  In times past each and every one of those cadets would have been expelled. 

Recent events have demonstrated senior officers, many graduates of West Point, have abandoned all of that, including the Secretary of Defense.  When the people leading those who are supposed to be the defenders of a nation lack honor, and promote those who are equally lacking, who will man the walls and tell the nation, "no one will harm you on my watch"? 

Over the weekend I watched Midway, the 2019 version and it was just as inspiring this time as it was the last time.  Watch it and ask yourself: 

If that's who we were, who are we now?  

This movie depicts another generation. This movie shames the current generation.

Whodunit It? The Wokes Did!

By Daniel Greenfield  @ Sultan Knish Blog

Agatha Christie, an elderly lady from Devon, had plenty of blood on her hands, all of it fictional. But none of the killers in her many books and short stories are nearly as monstrous or obsessed as the censorious wokes who have been coming after the deceased author for decades.

The latest episode in the long-running saga takes place not on a luxurious train speeding through Yugoslavia or on the Nile, but at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) which had performed Christie’s play, “And Then There Were None.”

“And Then There Were None” is a natural fit for a high school setting. With lots of different balanced roles and one-note characters who reveal a hidden side, it’s a training wheels production for students learning the basics of performing a character and acting on stage.

It’s also fun. Ten people. One island. And a killer.

There’s a reason why “And Then There Were None” has remained popular and Hollywood keeps ripping it off for movies like 2022’s ‘The Menu’ which added food to the premise.

Over February, a mutlti-racial cast of Philly teens had taken on the roles of murderers and murder victims on an island off Christie’s native Devon, England, with the enthusiasm and polish to be expected of teenage actors, and had fun with it, smoking cigars, rocking in rocking chairs, dressing up and trying to deliver lines in shocked voices, until they were told it was all wrong.

And the play, based on one of the best-selling novels ever written, was really a hate crime.

While there’s nothing objectionable about the play (unless you object to people being murdered, which wokes do not), it’s based on a Christie novel whose title once had the “N-word” in it after a minstrel song. It was then charged to “Ten Little Soldiers” or “Ten Little Indians” in various versions and eventually became known as “And Then There Were None.” The novel never appeared under its original offensive name in America and it’s been that way since 1940.

As a British author, Christie didn’t understand the offensiveness of the “N-word” and American culture the way that the Yanks did. By the end of the forties, Christie had cleaned up her own books long before the modern woke publishers began rewriting them for offensive content.

There’s nothing actually racist about “And Then There Were None.” None of the characters are black, but one of the white characters is actually punished for his abuses toward African people.

Philip Lombard, one of the more clearly evil characters, describes stealing the food of his African mercenaries. “Natives don’t mind dying, you know. They don’t feel about it as Europeans do,” he villainously claims. That original crime is the reason why he deserves to die.

But still the staff at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts are fielding outrage because the school allowed “And Then There Were None” to be performed despite the fact that over eighty years ago, before anyone involved was born, it used to have a racist title.

And, worse still, the performance had happened during Black History Month.

Some wokes figured it out and became professionally outraged, claiming that the play contained “racist, xenophobic, and violent content”. Violent content in a murder mystery? Well, I never!

Outraged leftists claimed that the play about ten bad people being killed off by an unknown murderer “lacked historical context and did not provide any cautionary preface or follow-up discussion”. Wokes love nothing more than adding mandatory trigger warnings to everything..

The mother of a student complained, “there was a scene in the play where a noose swings out on stage and a white student is holding the noose.The whole crowd gasped. We were not sure if somebody was going to get lynched or what would happen next. I was kind of aghast and shocked.”

Spoiler alert: no one got ‘lynched’ on an island off the English coast in the 1930s. The noose serves to enable the climactic suicide. It has nothing whatsoever to do with lynching. That didn’t stop an NPR affiliate from writing multiple paragraphs describing the history of lynching in America, which has as much to do with the play as Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan.

Molefi Asante, an African American studies prof, insisted the school should have lectured on “the history of racism in Britain and America” and “why this play is significant now. The director of the play missed an opportunity to really educate the students about the meaning of the play.”

The meaning of the play is that it’s entertaining. That is a concept wokes are incapable of understanding. It is not about the history of racism. It has no significance “now” or ever. It is refreshingly free of George Floyd, Trans Visibility or any of the things wokes insist plays must be about. It’s fun and there’s nothing that wokes hate more than fun. Except maybe white people.

Since the squeaky wokes get the grease, CAPA’s principal has already apologized “for the offense that this has caused” and vowed that while she “cannot undo the harm caused, please know that as a school community we are taking active and intentional steps to prevent similar incidents in the future.” That means all future plays will be about transgenders and lynching.

CAPA is holding a ‘Town Hall’ at which outraged wokes will scream about their pain until there are none left to listen. No amount of apologies will sate their bloodlust, only embolden them.

Throughout all of the subsequent outrage, none of them has managed to coherently explain what’s wrong with the play aside from the novel’s original title. Multiple people interviewed by the local NPR arm still could not explain what they were offended by except the original title.

And until they were told about the title, they had no idea that anything was wrong.

That’s because there was nothing wrong. And had someone not checked Wikipedia, it would have stayed that way. Wokes are not genuinely offended, they’re seeking to take offense. The more offended they are, the more power they get. And the more power they get, the more offended they are. The vicious cycle of violence is what “And There Were None” is About.

Whodunit? The wokes did.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

The Army’s ‘Recruitment Crisis’ Happened When White Recruits Stopped Showing Up

A DEI driven 43% drop in white recruits caused the Army’s ‘recruitment crisis’.

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

The military recruitment crisis that has crippled our defense capabilities has been talked to death by generals, politicians and pundits who have blamed everything from rising minimum wages to obesity to Gen Z culture for the problem. They have raised enlistment bonuses to unprecedented levels, spent fortunes on ad campaigns that feature lesbian weddings and doubled down on DEI as the answer to the crisis. And yet the crisis has grown worse.

That’s because recruitment was a self-inflicted problem caused by a woke racist military.

Between 2018 and 2023, white Army recruits, once the mainstay, fell from a bare majority of 56% to a minority at 44%.  This was not an unintended effect, but policy.

“We are an Army that wants to look like America,” Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, the first black head of Army Recruiting Command, had proclaimed.

Gen. Gary Brito, the first black head of Army Training and Doctrine Command under whose purview recruiting falls, and the former deputy Army chief of staff for personnel, had boasted of Army “listening sessions” on racism, diversity and inclusion in order to maximize diversity.

Military brass had been tasked with creating a military that “looked more like America” and as a result the number of white Army recruits declined year by year and fell 43% from 44,042 in 2018 to 25,070 in 2023.

Black, Hispanic and other minority recruits became a majority, but there weren’t any more of them than there had been before. Minorities were joining the Army at the same rate as they had before, but with fewer white recruits they had become a majority by default.

Pushing white men away with DEI struggle sessions, affirmative action quotas and mandatory pronoun training was supposed to open the door for minorities who were being ‘blocked’ by the ‘whiteness’ of the military from joining up and serving, but the minorities aren’t showing up.

Equity had created a recruitment crisis with a majority-minority enlistment population that looked good on paper, but without the white recruits, the Army experienced a shortfall of 10,000 recruits. Rather than growing the Army, the emphasis on DEI had shrunk it instead.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth urged “strategically deploying recruiters to communities across the country based on demographics, ethnicity, race, and gender.”

40% of military recruits come out of the South, 44% come from rural areas and the Army instead began recruiting in “underrepresented cities” like Baltimore, Minneapolis, and New York City.

Wormuth, who got her start as a Clinton intern, complained that, “today more than 80% of recruits come from military families. There is a risk of developing a warrior caste when only 1% of the population serves in the military.” But without the “warrior caste”, no one serves.

Woke military leaders turned their backs on the white rural men from military families who represented their recruitment base and instead began chasing minority recruits in NYC.

A Quinnipiac poll from 2022 found that if America were invaded, 70% of men, 40% of women, 57% of white men, 61% of Hispanics and 38% of black people would stay and fight. Military recruitment has been retooled to focus on those least likely to want to fight for America.

West Point was turning away even very well qualified white candidates while its Director of Admissions admitted that “every qualified African-American applicant were offered admission into West Point, yet the class composition goal was still lacking.” The goal was the United States Military Academy’s intensive quota system meant to cut 20% of white officers from the mix.

The Academy has been sued by qualified white candidates, including a high school student with a 4.2 GPA, three family members currently serving in the military and a grandfather who fought in the Army on D-Day, who were kept out because their skin color was not diverse enough.

Beyond the Army, this was a problem that was taking place across the entire military.

The Senate recently voted to confirm Charles Q. Brown Jr. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While serving as Air Force Chief of Staff, Brown had endorsed a 43% quota for white male officers at a time when 86% of pilots are white men. That’s how you get recruitment shortages.

As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Brown is in a position to deepen the military’s systemic racism.

The recruitment crisis was a case of the woke military leadership getting almost exactly what they wanted. White men, locked out of career tracks, forced into implicit bias and pronoun training, have opted out. Military families are telling their kids not to serve and ending the “warrior caste” that Army Secretary Christine Wormuth was worried about. And with Army recruiters focusing on Baltimore and New York City, instead of the rural South, potential recruits are left behind. But the woke military is struggling and failing to find the woke recruits it wanted.

It was always the rural white men who were going to be the likeliest to fight and die for America.

“We’ve never offered $50,000 to join the Army,” Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, head of U.S. Army Recruiting Command, had said. You can’t pay anyone enough to hold the line on the battlefield.

The Army turned away those who would serve for love of their country and can’t seem to find enough of those diverse Gen Z’ers with multiple pronouns who will serve for money.

The leaders who have made these decisions have blamed the crisis on everything except their policies. They claim that obesity, the job market, opioids and even an “underfunded public school system” are the reasons that recruits aren’t showing up. The real reason is racism.

Their racism.

The recruitment crisis consists of the missing white men who aren’t showing up for duty.

The military doesn’t have a recruitment crisis: it has a systemic racism crisis. Reversing the recruitment crisis requires getting rid of DEI. Woke military leaders have claimed that they need DEI to prepare for the diverse recruits of tomorrow, but the diverse recruits aren’t coming.

The U.S. Army signed a $4 billion marketing contract with Omnicom, one of whose subsidiaries worked on the Biden campaign, to market the military. It could tear up that contract, save the money and restore the traditions of honor, colorblind service and integrity that made it strong.

Ending woke systemic racism in the military will also end the recruitment crisis.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Thirty Pieces of Silver: Catholic Universities That Go Woke

Fordham, Notre Dame and Georgetown are just a few fatalities.

January 12, 2024 by Thom Nickels Leave a Comment

The Jesuit-run Fordham University in New York has a rich literary history.  Edgar Allan Poe spent time at Fordham when it was known as St. John’s College. He was living in a cottage, the guest of Reverend Edward Doucet, SJ, who allowed him unlimited use of the college library.  Poe thoroughly enjoyed the Jesuits and once said that they were

“highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars, they smoked and they drank and they played cards, and they never said a word about religion.”

The Jesuits in Poe’s time, while not the radical (and often heretical) usurpers of traditional Catholicism that we’ve come to know today, still had something of an edge in the 1840’s, the time that Poe got to know them..........To Read More....

Ignorance Breeds Complacency, Complacency Breeds Tyranny

Time and Truth Are on the Same Side, and Conspiracies Are Real

By Rich Kozlovich 

Biden is an idiot, his family is steeped in crime right up to their eyeballs, and the more Trump is attacked, the better he looks.  Another indictment and the nation may just anoint him as King Donald the First.  For a start, here's an excellent thought for the day.  I don’t remember who said this, but it’s a goodie. 

"Anyone who believes that politicians and bureaucrats who can't define what a woman is, who can't control the border, can't tell the truth about COVID, who can't teach children to read and do math at grade level, and who lied continuously about Obamacare can control temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity should make sure they never have to debate a five-year-old."

I've been a history buff for all of my life, and I concluded decades ago, everything is cyclical!  I read George Friedman's book,  "Storm Before Calm", which deals with this very well.   Recently I read, "The Fourth Turning", which also deals with historical cycles.  Complicated book, complicated verbiage, entirely too long, way too wordy, which seem to me fails in “coherence through connectives”, a fundamental when it comes to writing and speaking if you really want people to understand what you’re saying. 

Reading it is a challenge.  At this point it seems to be as much mystical as historical in its projections, and yet, the book has some interesting insights claiming among other things, we're in what he calls the Fourth Turning of the current cycle.  Actually, I agree with that.  While I do question his time lines, which seems to do some cherry picking, however, in his analyses every cycle has what he calls a Fourth Turning, and each of those “turnings” were crisis periods, and historically, his fourth turnings have always been conclusively violent.  I fear this is going to happen with, or in, America within the next ten years.  Probably less, especially events surrounding this election, as Im expecting to see massive riots before and after the election, the recent events in Portland is in my opinion a harbinger of things to come. 

China's military buildup has been financed by American trade, and now as a result, there are ten ways the US is falling behind China in national security.  That build up is intended to destroy America.  

Hypersonic missiles, fleet size, air defense, manufacturing, technology, much of which they've stolen, mining for rare earths, gray zone altercations.  Gray zone altercations are non-shooting military intimidation tactics they regularly play with their neighbors.  In short, they're bullies, and don't care if anyone likes it or not. Then there’s their excursions into space, cyber operations, and artificial intelligence. 

But America's military is not to be outdone.  Noooo, we have a Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, "a man of incredible vision" who has clearly identified the military’s real problems undermining America's military readiness and capability.  

The twin crises of white supremacy and gender.

We can't keep our subs repaired, recruitment is in the toilet, he kicked out many highly qualified men over their refusal to take "the shot", many combat aircraft are permanently on the ground, and the generals and admirals are all members of the Church of Wokeness and are committed to DEI mandates, which has proven disastrous in our schools, and our businesses, why would it be any better in our military?  The incompetence and corruption of the officer corp is mind boggling. 

But hey, we gotta have our priorities.  Right?

The unending political persecution of  Donald Trump by the corrupt Deep State and the Democrat party is blatantly Stalinist.   While I can acknowledge the contributions of Thomas Jefferson, I'm not a big fan.  But he was brilliant as he once observed:

All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one. 

An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others. Nor should our assembly be deluded by the integrity of their own purposes, and conclude that these unlimited powers will never be abused, because themselves are not disposed to abuse them.

They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people…. Jefferson warned that relatively soon, “corruption” will have seized the heads of government” and “spread by them” through the “body of the people” — also known as…Congress.

How was Jefferson able to see this so clearly?   He read a history book or two, and there's nothing new under the sun. 

The fact is, what he warned about started happening not too long after the Constitution was ratified with the Whiskey Tax of 1791.  A tax which was clearly unequal, unfair, violated states’ rights, culminating with a greater violation of states’ rights with Washington leading an army into Pennsylvania to put down the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.   It all merely expanded to what we're seeing. We now call it Crony Capitalism. 

This tax was promoted by then Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and was directly beneficial to the whiskey distillers in the major metropolitan areas.  The Constitution had just been ratified in 1787, a mere four years before, and Hamilton wanted to solidify support for the Constitution from the business community.   Hamilton was strong advocate of strong centralized federal power over republicanism and states’ rights, and Washington never made any effort to thwart this.  Washington was lauded by Congress for this action, and those who supported his venture claimed he once again saved the nation, and this time from a challenge to federal authority by the people. 

Jefferson rightly recognized if for what it was.  Washington's call for troops to put down this rebellion was in point of fact an abuse of Presidential power and authority, a veiled threat to the citizens of the nation, and a threat to republican ideals. While I do think Washington deserves praise as the Father of Our Nation because of his personal courage, amazing leadership skills, and his willingness to walk away from power after two terms, I also think he's overrated, most certainly as a general, but also as a President.

Jefferson's administration repealed the Whiskey Tax.

Banks are cancelling the accounts of people who hold political views they don't like, investment companies are ignoring their fiduciary responsibilities to their investors in order to support ESG and DEI conceptualized companies, many of which are either under performing or outright failing.  But they have no problem with the insane leftist radicals that are destroying western culture and ultimately civilization.  

Heresy is rampant at the highest levels of "Christian" churches. Biden can't afford to build a border wall, yet he really wants to give Ukraine another unaccountable, untraceable 20 billion dollars, to one of, if not the most, corrupt governments in Europe, and the Deep State and an international elite are creating what's being called "a new normal".  An international tyranny that you had better like or else. A tyranny determined to destroy all Constitutional guarantees.

All of that has now become obvious.

In years gone by there was a lot of laughing and friendly banter between me and my friends over my claims about conspiracies.  Well, whaddayaknow. There really is such a thing as a conspiracy after all, and they're not laughing any longer. 

Just like Jefferson, I read a history book...or two...., and there's nothing new under the sun. 

A Woke Richard III Will Truly Prove a Villain

By  Daniel Greenfield  @ Sultan Knish Blog 

The outgoing artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company has announced that from now on only disabled actors will be allowed to play Richard III. In a woke world where vice presidents and Supreme Court justices are chosen based on their skin color and gender, to “prove” a hunchbacked villain, you must be a hunchback or at least have something wrong with you.

The RSC boasts that it cast the first disabled actor in the role, Arthur Hughes, a 30-year-old who “has no thumb or radius bone in his right arm” and therefore identifies as “limb different”.

The real Richard III had scoliosis, Shakespeare used that to make him appear grotesquely villainous, while the new woke overlords use it to make the long dead king a victim.

Next thing you know, actors will need to have syphilis to play Hitler.

Now that Richard III is a member of a designated victim group, his namesake play can be reinterpreted as a commentary on social prejudice against the disabled. It may even have to be rewritten so that he prevails at the end. Or risk having everyone involved in it canceled.

Limiting the role to actors with some sort of disability, like limiting Supreme Court nominations to black leftist women, won’t lead to good performances. Richard III will move to the back of the Bard’s catalog and having been made woke will, like all woke things, become mediocre.

Either that or talented actors will fake a disability, Tootsie style, to get a shot at the role.

"It's the Othello syndrome isn't it? That moment when white actors stopped thinking of Othello in their repertoire," Gregory Doran, the outgoing RSC director, scolded. "It's the same with disabled actors and Richard."

The woke critics applauding this move also cheered Denzel Washington’s half-hearted performance as Macbeth. The Scottish were much more of an oppressed group in England than black people, who were not even around, but the double standard is double for a reason.

The RSC’s insistence on wokeness and fidelity did not prevent it from casting Patrick Stewart in the violently antisemitic Merchant of Venice and then staging it in Vegas, complete with an Elvis impersonator and showgirls on a casino floor as a critique of capitalism. The scene of Stewart wearing a tallit and kippah while brandishing a butcher knife was especially Der Sturmerish.

Truly, “Thou cam'st on earth to make the earth my hell”.

Instead of life imitating art, even the highest art becomes a mawkish rendition of life with the same rigid embrace of racial quotas and stereotypes as a government employment office.

Once the Royal Shakespeare Company went woke, it lost any interest in historical authenticity, and the pretense of sensitivity is just that. The movement to carve out roles for specific victim groups is a political act with no fidelity to any humanistic principle.

Reinventing Shakespeare for a woke age requires dropping his concerns with court politics and conscience and replacing it with the current court politics of race, gender, and sexuality, while entirely dispensing with questions of conscience. Instead of the dynastic politics of York and Lancaster, the dynasties that matter are those of inherited and adapted victimhood. But the underlying question remains the same. Who has the right to rule and at what moral cost?

The woke answer is that only the oppressed deserve power and at any possible price.

The moral concerns of Hamlet, Macbeth, and other court protagonists are now dismissed as white privilege. Richard III and wokeness is a marriage made in a perfect literary hell.

Wokeness unintentionally performs Richard III’s bitterness and megalomania, his self-loathing and cruelty, and his disdain for any limits on power. Leftists plotting to pack the Supreme Court, federalize elections, censor and imprison their opponents, and harass judges in their homes, reply to liberal objections with Richard III’s line, “conscience is but a word that cowards use.”

Unable to address that central issue, the moral limits of power, woke Shakespeare becomes a parade of victimized villains reinterpreted through the lens of identity politics, a disabled Richard III, a transgender Lady Macbeth, and a racially oppressed Othello, whose downfalls are not commentaries on conscience, but on the effects of an oppressive society on minorities, justifying their crimes in the name of identity politics.

They are not the villains. Instead we are all the villains.

The Soviets had trouble grappling with Shakepeare’s insistence on individual conscience instead of social collectivism. Western social collectivism has become nearly as impermeable to the fundamental questions in Shakespeare’s tragedies that it cannot even process the individual except as a reaction to social classes and racial groups. Shakespeare proved timeless because each generation was able to lift the moral dilemma from the social context. But in the woke era, there is no moral dilemma, there is only the relentless social context and political propaganda.

Shakespeare was always political propaganda, but the woke reinterpretations drop Tudor ambitions for leftist ones. The message of every theatrical production, every book and movie, every comic and poem, is that familiar Soviet one that only leftists have the right to rule because only they are willing to radically reform society on behalf of the “wretched of the earth.”

It’s an agenda that Richard III was familiar with in substance, if not in form. “And thus I clothe my naked villany/With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ/And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.” Virtue signaling is the art of devils playing saints. The devils are always victims, bewailing the plight of imprisoned terrorists, violent robbers, women unable to kill their babies, and other such oppressed victims they use to justify the seizure of total and absolute power.

Richard is a self-aware villain. His contemporaries, for the most part, lack all self-awareness. That is the difference between art and life. Stage villains know themselves while politicians, pundits, and activists rarely do. The radicals threatening Supreme Court justices in defense of inftanticide have no concept of their monstrousness. That is why stage villains are useful.

They remind us of what we can become.

Reinventing Richard III as a victim, a member of an oppressed group, sends the opposite message. And that’s intentional. By making it impossible for Richard III to be a villain, the leftists who terrorize society are immunized from the dictates of conscience. Villains who once warned of individual moral responsibility now serve to echo collectivist warnings of social responsibility.

And the wokes are shielded from the realization that they are the villains.

The outcome of this reasoning is familiar from art and life. “Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end”.

In life and art, men play roles, and in both, authorities mandate what roles they can play. The limitations are revealing of social boundaries. Banning actors from portraying members of certain groups is a statement that there is a vast gulf between them that runs in one direction. A white man cannot envision what being black is like and a healthy man cannot act out a disability.

Can a 21st century actor convincingly portray a Roman or a Greek, or a medieval noble? Can an actor whose great challenge is projecting emotion capture the brutal realities of power? Are these really far easier to bridge than the difference between a black and white actor?

The idea that different streams of experience represent different mutually inaccessible “truths” is central to identity politics and opposed to art. But the conviction that we are bound to be permanent strangers to one another lies at the heart of the Left’s apartheid power.

The roles that actors are being segregated from are also the ones that represent the ruling class. And the ruling idea that justifies their rule. Actors blasphemously insist that they can play anyone and deny the verity of identity politics. If anyone can play anyone then the boundaries of identity politics that justify every crime that leftists have committed are disturbingly fragile.

Actors acting across races and all the boundaries of identity politics are undermining the sacred segregation on which everything depends. Those who believe that art must imitate life, fear that life will instead imitate art.

That’s why, unlike Shakespeare’s day, men can’t play women on stage, just in real life.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

Leaked NSA ‘Glossary’ Contains Hundreds of ‘Woke’ DEI and CRT Terms

CV News Feed on November 15, 2023

The Biden administration’s National Security Agency (NSA) compiled a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Glossary that contained 34 pages of far-left ideological words and phrases.  The NSA is an agency of the Department of Defense (DoD). 

“The following is a glossary of terms and language commonly used in dialogue regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice to be used as a reference,” stated the government document, which was recently leaked following an investigation by The Daily Wire. 

“It is by no means a comprehensive list and, in every context, the meaning of these words may change and evolve,” the document continued. “This glossary and its definitions provide a starting point for engaging in open and honest conversation, and is a tool meant to build a shared language of understanding.”

Daily Wire field reporter Spencer Lindquist wrote that the list of more than 300 terms was “published internally on May 6th, 2022” by the NSA. He added that it was “never released publicly before” it was leaked. 

Linquist also observed that the glossary “explicitly endorses the tenets of Critical Race Theory [CRT] and Queer Theory” – two terms it also defines.

“The definition for ‘settler colonialism’ blames ‘white European occupations of land in what is now the United States,’ for leading to ‘oppressive governance’ and ‘white supremacy,’” Lindquist pointed out on X (formerly Twitter)...............To Read More....

 

Please, O woke masters, help us!

November 8, 2023 By J.A. Frascino @ American Thinker  

 

Editor's Note: I've not asked for nor received permission to publish this in full, but I love the snarkiness and want to do what I can to generate as much coverage as possible. If the author or AT objects, I will break this down to a link. RK

We infidels all strive to purge our minds and souls of bigotry and intolerance, to be blessed with ordainment at the altar of wokeness, and to gain admission to the hallowed halls of eternal enlightenment.  We know that we must, most importantly, structure society in terms of well defined groups.  We have come to see that treating any member of a defined group as an individual is anathema and grounds for banishment from the fold.  We must unequivocally exalt and defend people of color, native Americans, those who choose the female gender, LGBTQs, asylum-seekers, “science," and all those feeling oppressed or victimized.  We must deplore and deny the legacy of American exceptionalism, white supremacy, Christian faith, patriarchy, biological sex, meritocracy, and conservative ideology.

We hold paramount adherence to these divine tenets.  Forgive us, then, when in striving for compliance and obedience we are confounded and distressed upon encountering conflicting traits within groups we must either embrace or reject.  How are we to react to evangelical blacks?  To black men who beat women?  To black conservatives?  To white women in general?  To gay bigots?  To Christian asylum-seekers?  To patriotic feminists?

We beseech you, O oracle of wokeness, to offer us guidance in this uncharted sea in which we are conflicted by the need to simultaneously embrace and reject individuals within a given group.  Perhaps assigning a weighted coefficient of 0 to 10 to each grouping would help those striving to don the mantle of true wokeness.  If defending asylum-seekers were given a priority rating of 8, for example, and decrying religion a 5, then even Bible-carrying asylum-seekers could be safely embraced without fear of breaching the basic tenets of wokeness.

We look forward with optimism to resolution of our plight so that we may confidently and with vigor navigate the path to woke orthodoxy.

 

Woke James Bond Novels Replace Him With Disabled Black Gay Superspy

“Do you expect me to talk?” No, I expect you to go woke.”

By Daniel Greenfield On September 22, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog</a>

Earlier this year word came that Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, which controls the rights to the deceased author’s novels, hired sensitivity readers to go through his books and purge anything that might offend sensitive woke souls. The newly republished novels warn that, “this book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace.”

Now that old Bond is dead, a new woke Bond can safely rise. Even though Ian Fleming has been dead since 1964, the estate turned to other authors to prime the giant money pump. Initially new Bond novels were written by prestigious writers like Kingsley Amis or former military men like John Gardner, but in more recent years turned the books over to wokes.

The latest of these come from Kim Sherwood, a University of Edinburgh lecturer who is interested in “women’s stories” and was authorized to write a feminist James Bond trilogy.

How do you write a feminist trilogy around one of the least feminist fictional characters around?

Easy, get rid of him.

In the new feminist novels, Miss Moneypenny has been promoted, Q has been replaced by a computer, and Bond by a woman, a black man and a Muslim man.

Sherwood’s feminist trilogy of Bond novels has the superspy go missing while she invents new zeroes to take his place. Sherwood’s “feminist perspective” on James Bond gets rid of the white man and offers an “ensemble cast of heroes who we can all identify with.”

“I want to bring a feminist perspective to the canon,” Sherwood pitched, to “create a space for all of us to be heroes.” As long as they aren't white men. The new zeroes prioritize “inclusivity, female heroes, and heroes of colour” including a black gay disabled 004, a female 003 and a Pakistani Muslim 009.

Sid Bashir, the Muslim replacement for James Bond, remembers standing by his mother’s side at an Islamic cultural fair after 9/11 under a banner reading, “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic.” Another scene quotes the Koran and has Bashir saying, “May Allah bless your family.”

“I was born poor, black and gay, I know about hard times,” 004 who, it is important to note, is black and gay says.

This isn’t just bad writing, it reads like a right-wing parody of wokeness.

Joseph Dryden, aka 004, the disabled black gay replacement for Bond, is fighting to stop an evil billionaire who claims he can reverse 'climate change' without people having to reduce their 'carbon emissions'.

"You're not the first white industrialist to put a man who looks like me in a cage," he scolds the, inevitably, white male villain.

Moneypenny stops to deliver a lecture on 'climate change; warning of 'arctic melting, rising seas, flooding deadly heat waves" unless we "shift toward a global commons" and "sustainable, inclusive development" using "low material growth" while "driving down inequality". In this version of Bond, not only is he missing, but his bosses are Communists.

One scene takes place in a police station overrun by a leftist mob where “feminists, anarchists”, socialists and advocates for climate justice” have turned it into an “anti-capitalist party center.”

This is the woke utopia. Inclusivity means erasing everyone who doesn’t fit into this leftist vision of the ideal society.

“Bond has always been a fantasy, but it’s a fantasy that can reflect us and shape us and I’m so excited to get to be part of that for a contemporary world,” Kim Sherwood argued.

The thing about fantasies is that they have to be grounded in something. The old Bond was a series of fantasies grounded in the Cold War and some espionage experience by Fleming, but wokeness is already a fantasy and Bond authors no longer know anything except politics.

Politics in Bond novels used to be subtext, but now it’s text.

Earlier this year, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd rushed to publication a new novel, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, to mark Charles III’s coronation. Every monarch gets the 007 writer that he or she deserves. Queen Liz got Fleming while King Charlie has to make do with Charlie Higson, a comedian, who famously accused Winston Churchill of being secretly gay.

The Bond novel celebrated Charlie’s coronation, dubbed “King Charles the Woke”, by going up against COVID conspiracists, immigration opponents, and critics of Black Lives Matter and the transgender movement who asked things like “What are we going to do about the Muslims?”

Conservatives are a pretty reliable demographic for James Bond novels, but much like the film industry, publishing is making it clear that it not only doesn’t want them as writers, but even as readers. That is even more true of the Big 5 publishing industry in the United States.

If Ian Fleming, the actual Bond author, were alive today, he would be one of the villains. Fleming was anti-union, opposed to the welfare state and a conservative. But the old Bond novels upheld the primacy of Britain while in the new woke novels, the touchstones are no longer patriotism and country, but diversity.

“Bond was struck by something. It was a long while since he’d been at any kind of function that was almost exclusively full of men. It felt strange. There was not even a pretence at diversity here. Athelstan hadn’t been the least bit concerned about ensuring that half of the people he’d hired to carry out his coup should be women, or non-white, or disabled,” the novel has him say.

Fortunately, the new Bond novels more than make up for it with women, non-white and disabled superspies who battle the forces of ignorance and skepticism about mutilating children.

Heroically they penetrate super-secret fortresses and uncover plots to say politically incorrect things on social media after Islamic terrorist attacks. And they always take time out to remind you of their suffering as black, gay, disabled Pakistani Muslims who are the real victims.

Who needs Bond, James Bond, when we’ve got Victim, Woke Victim?

Daniel Greenfield 

is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's   Front Page Magazine.. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Nothing Sacred

By Daniel Greenfield August 30, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Since 2001, suicide rates increased by around 40% and religious identity fell by 25%. These seemingly random statistics are data points in a web defining America’s postmodern malaise.

Within a generation a nation that had been a global model of a modern society has imploded. Old demons like racism have come roaring back in a country that is more divided than ever. Another civil war, once a farfetched science fiction tale, now seems almost inevitable. In nearly every statistic that touches on our social bonds, America has become a disaster area.

From individuals to our families to our cities to our nation, we are coming apart. Suicide rates, drug overdoses, urban collapse, crime waves, hate, violence, fear and economic decline are everywhere. The majority of Americans don’t believe that the future holds anything better.

There are many explanations for what is happening, but a basic one is that we are the plane plummeting from the sky after all the rivets holding it together had come out. The rivets were those things which politicians blather about, the ones that hold us together, and without them we are defined only by those things which divide us. We’re separate parts falling down to earth.

Religion was a fundamental unity. Commonalities of faith allowed America to weather crises like the civil war or the civil rights struggles because underlying the anger were shared values. We no longer have shared values and while religion is not the only issue, it is a major indicator.

The deconstruction of country and faith left us with little more than accidents of geography, social class, race, tastes, politics, and the other things which divide us as our defining identities.

The moral motive force of a deconstructionist society in which nothing is sacred is to be defined by what we are against. Negative outrage, rather than any drive for the good, came to be the highest value. After the fall of Communism, the leftist ideology that transformed the country lacks any credible vision of a better world. The feeble gesturing toward Europe’s health care or China’s rapid trains quickly give way to a movement that is defined by its hatred of what is.

The class warfare conspiracy theories, tales of oppressed workers, strikers battling with the bosses, bomb throwers sabotaging capitalism, revolutionary vanguards overthrowing kings is where the moral passion of leftists always lay, but in the past this had been dismissed as a temporary stage. Now the violence and hate have become not the journey, but the destination.

Anti-racism contends that racism will exist as long as whiteness does. Wokeness holds out no hope of a better world, only a resistance that destroys the old but, even if it eliminates all the white people or heterosexual males, will likely never be freed of the intellectual residue of whiteness, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisness and other thought crimes yet to be revealed.

Wokeness is an admission inherent in the long failed drives toward ‘True Communism’ in Russia, China and other totalitarian red states that utopia will never arrive. All leftists can do is sign up for an Orwellian perpetual cycle of purges against the enemies of their ideals.

That sort of ‘Oppositionism’ was the inevitable consequence of trying to actively realize an impossible ideal and then, out of the throes of its failure, defining the movement around a perpetual hostility to conservatives and traditionalists with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Oppositionism is what remains in a society where nothing is sacred and all that’s left is hatred of the other. If nothing is truly sacred and there is nothing higher to aspire to, then what defines us is what divides us, and we no longer need to know who we are, only what it is we hate.

The madness of oppositionism leads Democrat moms to take their toddlers to drag shows and buy them copies of Ibram X. Kendi’s ‘Anti-Racist Baby’ board book because these are the things that the people they hate now hate and so it’s incumbent on ‘progressives’ to embrace them.

At the rate we are going, if conservatives came out against child sacrifice, there would be a line all through wealthy woke suburbs to deliver their children to Moloch. In a society where things like human life and the innocence of children are sacred, such things would be inconceivable, but in a ‘nothing sacred’ society, what appears sacred must give way to what we hate.

Nothing sacred, certainly not religion, but not even that which even the most primitive barbaric tribes value, like the protection of women and children, can stand up to the power of hate.

And the need to destroy what we are to differentiate ourselves from that which we hate.

A generation ago, few college women would have been willing to throw away the hard won feminist privilege of female sports to cater to a handful of mentally ill men. But the combined forces of woke identity politics and, almost as importantly, conservative opposition made it a tenet of faith that men who say they’re women have transcended biology and questioning that is a hate crime.

The postmodern moloch of wokeness asks of its followers that they sacrifice what is most precious to them, children, born and unborn, masculinity, femininity, athletic opportunity, honor and morality, in order to not only signal their virtue, but to differentiate themselves from the hated other tribe that they have been cursed to temporarily share parts of the country with.

The ancient pagans castrated themselves to worship the ‘goddess’ while the new pagans castrate themselves to reject toxic masculinity, traditional gender roles and everything that they have been taught is evil. The end result of people who define themselves by the rejection of what they hate is that they lose themselves and destroy their bodies and their souls.

That is what is happening to America.

The idea that some positive unifying vision would emerge in the twilight of religion was always a delusional fantasy. Religion was replaced by cults of personality, like that of Hitler and Stalin, and more contemporary examples, by a cannibalistic consumerism, and by a politics that pervaded everything.

Leftists promised that their politics could realize what religion only promised in exchange for total commitment and submission. Their failures cost a hundred million lives as a down payment. With the theoretical underpinnings in ruins, the politics is still everywhere, its promise is the destruction of everything else. Only when everything is gone, something better might emerge in some undefined fashion. But no one holds out any real expectation that it will.

This is oppositionism at its starkest, with no hope and no future, only the ruins of victory.

A sacred society is working toward something while an oppositionist society is nihilistic, existing for the destruction of its enemies, hoping and dreaming for nothing except death. Oppositionism cannot win because it has no concept of what victory even looks like. It barely bothers to dwell on the subject because deep down it has despaired of man and doesn’t believe that it can win.

The decline of religion, of the conviction that there is a ‘sacred’ worth building and protecting, has left behind passing emotions, mob movements, and outbursts, but nothing that endures. The sacred conviction of one moment, as in the aftermath of 9/11, is discarded when a new outrage comes along. And in oppositionism, there are always new outrages and convictions.

A sacred society is not a call for a theocracy, the coming together of the church and state is unhealthy for both, but for the importance of what we believe in. Movements, like wokeness, that cannot even summon up a plausible conception of the positive tend to form in societies that have lost the knowledge that life matters and that there is a higher purpose to our existence.

The sacred imagination looks in awe beyond the horizon in search of what moves us to be more than we are, while the oppositionist imagination is bent on dividing us to justify its cynical view of human nature. To the sacred, we are children of a higher power, while to the oppositionist we are biological meat machines driven by genetic predestination and crude impulses that are easily manipulable to those with the cleverness and the daring to impose their will on us.

That is the unexpected but fundamental breach between the sacred and the radical: is man free or a slave, was he made for better things or to be part of a mob, can we rise above ourselves?

Answer the question and you understand the movement, its nature and its misery.

Why shouldn’t biological slaves denied the hope of sacredness or transcendence destroy themselves? Why should they believe that tomorrow holds anything better than today? The icebergs are melting, capitalism is collapsing, extinction is coming and mankind will vanish. What’s there to really stay around except spite and violence against the other tribe?

Religion, true ideals, redeem us from this barbaric despair. Oppositionism, when its grandiose promises have failed, plunges societies back into that despair, and offers nothing more than the opportunity to burn it all down in a final funeral pyre in the ultimate act of social suicide.

This is the final end, individual and communal, of a society in which nothing is sacred.

The outcomes of civil wars are measured not only by what is destroyed, but by what is built. Out of a civil war between loyalists and rebels, came the United States of America. As we approach the precipice of a civil war, we may wish to consider what construction would arise from it.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.