Cancel culture now works much like the litigious, regulatory state: when someone's an ---hole internally you can always cancel them for a tweet just like if you really want to go after a political or cultural opponent now you can go after them for breaking a law or regulation.
When everyone's potentially guilty but no one yet realizes that this is the case, how the system works, or the true depth of corruption, leverage goes to those willing and able to attack a single party - especially if they gang up together.
So you get a sort of ruling clique situation without the actual rule of law or manners/polite company. Run with the group, or you will be singled out for lawsuits or a firing even though yer just doing what everyone else has or is doing.
It's not hypocrisy when all have fallen short: it's simply how the game is played. Stay w/the pack & you'll be fine. Earn their disfavor & you will be canceled. When it's hard to fire anyone for performance & things are uniformly corrupt yet over regulated, it will only increase.
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All the wannabe moderates crack me up. The upshot of this administration is the creation of a radical racialist legal/policy/educatory regime and a complete and explicit rejection of the American notion of equality under law. Legally enforced racialized division/racial hierarchy.
Most people's heads are full of smoke on this due to a rabid & obfuscatory media environment full of lies, etc. But at this point, if you don't understand what "equity" means to these peeps (as opposed to "equality", which is rejected as racist) - you need to wake the hell up.
The smarty mid-dip-shit take on the 1776 Commission is similar: "Wull ackshually we taught that America was perfect like never in decades so now we need to say it is intrinsically evil or say there's no tru narrative unlike this document which echoes wut used to be common sense."
Republicans ought to utterly reject words like "insurrection" and "sedition" being thrown around carelessly to smear their fellow Americans. If they accept this escalation and broad application of language on the part of their enemies, they will also accept the "remedy":
Which millions of Americans - all of whom said Republicans need as voters - know will soon be the left's use of the national security state to crush their opponents and reframe the national debate to cancel half the nation.
Americans who demanded we investigate election fraud after an election in which Dems used 100s of lawsuits & administrative fiat to change the rules midstream are not insurrectionists nor seditious. They want free & fair elections & equality under the law: in short, democracy.
National Review originally existed to put together a coalition against the left. Does it now exist to tear that coalition apart with the calumny of petulant hacks? Read @theammind and @ClaremontInst instead.
Black pill for the day: yes, you can retreat into the country but this will only make sense if red states refuse to bend the knee and act as bulwark against the developing totalitarian regime, which could easily disallow you from owning land and take you off the financial grid.
Where this ends if not fought off (and what major figures are fighting it?) = tiered levels of citizenship. The “meritocracy” has been moving this way for some time. The oligarchic impulse is to increasingly solidify your place as well as that of those you deem beneath you.
What’s disturbing is extent to which this is already the case. For instance, any white heterosexual Christian male seeking to study and teach major figures or aspects of western thought is systemically & structurally shut out of the academy, often as an official matter of policy.
Marv Levy, the Hall of Fame NFL coach who led the Buffalo Bills to four straight Super Bowls while losing each time, possessed an MA in English Literature from Harvard. After their first Super Bowl loss, he famously taught his team these simple lines from “Sir Andrew Barton”:
“I am hurt but I am not slain.
I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile,
Then I'll rise and fight again.”
I love the marvelous succinctness of these words in terms of grief, especially, but also other kinds of internal pain. It balances acknowledgement (rather than denial) of suffering with a determined and realistic perseverance.
It’s not even that I disagree with your performative intellectual “-ism-ist-ian” subgroup—it’s more that I don’t think it matters.
Yes, because it’s all cartoonishly shallow—make believe costumes. But mainly because a) no structures for serious thought and debate over time exist and b) most of you aren’t going to do or influence anything or anyone important.
The only real benefit of these kinds of ideological-intellectual leaders & jousters is that their snarky arguments against others & their sort of half-artificial, half-real -isms that catch on can be useful *means* for some to break through the veil & catch glimpses of the real.