1/ The woke are not trying to win the culture war against liberals intellectually, they are trying to win SOCIALLY.
The woke don't fight academically with evidence and reason.
They fight SOCIALLY using power moves to take over institutions and bullying tactics to shut us up.
2/ The woke do not want to merely participate in liberal democratic society; allowing their ideas to be carefully scrutinized by our academic, cultural and democratic institutions.
The woke want to SEIZE POWER in those institutions, and mutate them into institutions of wokeness.
3/ So the tactics adopted by the woke were developed for seizing institutional, cultural, and political power, not for discovering the truth. If it works to send social media mobs after people to get them fired so woke people can take their jobs works, then that is what they do.
4/ Since the goal of the woke is to seize social and political power so they can wield it in the name of their ideology, they are not interested in being kind, civil, or "nice."
In fact Robin DiAngelo actually says "niceness" is bad, and claims it reproduces white supremacy:
5/ The result is that when the woke try to get into positions of power, they do not typically do so by demonstrating they have the MERIT to be in those positions. They are not, to be frank, interested in meeting the standard of merit that liberals use in selecting their leaders.
6/ This is because the woke think liberals and other non-woke groups don't really care about merit, and just use merit as an excuse to keep "marginalized groups" out of positions of power. The woke think leadership requirements are little more than poorly disguised power hoarding
7/ As such they think meeting liberal standards accepts the logic of liberalism, which they reject and want to replace with wokeness.
So, rather than follow liberal rules of civility, merit, reason, and democracy; they follow woke rules and play cynical social power games.
8/ They will accuse, imply, and insinuate all kinds of things about anyone in order to socially destroy whoever dares to get in their way.
They're not going to tell you you're wrong, they're going to tell everyone else you're a racist, sexist, homophobe.
That's how it works.
9/ Here, @BretWeinstein explains how false accusations of racism were used to try to intimidate him into going along with a woke takeover of College where he was teaching at the time.
Please pay close attention here:
10/ In this Clip Reihan Salam (@reihan) response to comments by Eddie Glaude (@esglaude) and while he is talking Eddie interrupts him to insinuate that Reihan is not being genuiune and is merely trying to score political points in a debate.
This is a typical woke tactic.
11/ The point he is that if you think you're going to push back on wokeness with arguments according to the rules of civility, fairplay, evidence and reason you are sorely mistaken.
This is not how this works.
12/ The woke don't play that game. Theirs is a contest for power, and they use cynical social tactics in order to try to browbeat people into doing what the woke want them to do.
Push back requires we recognize what game the woke are playing, and make that clear to everyone else
13/ Wokeness has a vulnerability: being understood.
When people understand the game the woke play, they stop going along with it and the woke lose power.
So make their game clear, make it transparent, and call it out. The sooner you do the sooner they woke lose power.
/fin
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
People who celebrate the murder of their political opponents are not participating in the marketplace of ideas, they are encouraging deadly political violence by building a permission structure to legitimize and justify the murder of those they disagree with.
My freedom of speech means I get to clearly and succintly explain to the whole world that if you call for the assassination of your rivals this is not free speech, it is a direct incitement to political violence.
John Stewart Mill gave a famous example where he said that if someone claims corn dealers are starvering the poor this can be allowed if circulated through the press, but is not allowed when shouted in front of an excited mob assembled outside the house of a corn dealer....
1/ The Radical Left has used political violence to advance their cause for decades. What's new is the progressive left's professional class building a permission structure to justify the use of political violence
It's called Assassination Culture, and we need to talk about it
🧵
2/ To understand what's happening, you need to understand that the line between progressive-left professional class and radical left has been blurred. The extremist radical left and the socially progressive "bluesky left" are increasingly intertwined both socially and politically
3/ This is because many of the extremist radical from the 60's and 70' who advocated for, and participated in, the use of political violence have been welcomed into the mainstream institutions that are run by the progressive left professional class.
Look at the number of pro-athletes posting condolences about Charlie Kirk, and you'll see what a huge cultural figure he was.
He wasn't just famous in conservative circles, his clips debating college students were a loadbearing pillar of online political pop-culture
His willingness to calmly and politely debate all comers on any issue (at the very moment when cancel culture was strongest and people were afraid to say what they think) made him a sort of lovable internet folkhero.
He was an indelible piece of the online landscape.
Charlie was not quarantined to the "conservative ghetto" of online content; he broke contain and became a mainstream cultural figure.
Charlie became the cultural symbol of free debate, free speech, and settling differences in public with words
What he is describing here is the deconstruction of America as an ideal. The goal is to destroy America by subverting the conception of America as a force for good which sustains American confidence, and attacking the founding narrative from which America derives it's legitimacy.
They will try to redefine America in a way which subverts the legitimacy of America as a national project. They want to erase the current American narrative, and replace it with a new one which grants them the right to inherit America's wealth, power, prestige, and influence.
They will attack America the same way they attacked Universities: by undermining legitimacy, authority, and self-confidence by asserting that the whole project is just racism, colonialism, and oppression in disguise.
2/ on racist resentment against white people and racialist identity politics, complete with the racist stereotyping.
This shows a continuity of thinking over a period of a decade, and there has been no take back, or explanation for the disgustingly racist tweets she made.
3/ Chris said he didn't care if she was fired, the point was to use her posts to force the New Yorker to choose between equal enforcement of bans on hiring racists who make racist content, or to be explicit that racism against Jews and whites is allowed...