It’s true: I made a mistake. On Twitter dot com! So I issued a correction. The point Wokal is taking me to task for here is arguably the most inconsequential thing in the entire thread. Great place to start! 🧵
What Rufo wrote is a blatant falsehood. It amounts to “Commie Crenshaw says White bougie Black prole lulz.”
What Crenshaw claims in the excerpt is simple: both CRT and Marxism begin by appealing to a social ontology which is obscured by that society’s dominant self-conception.
Then Wokal pulls this tweet out of some random conversation from March to try to tie it into a gotcha, as he seems to think he has cornered me into some kind of full-blown race determinism. Absolute nonsense. "Simulacrum situation." Listen to Crenshaw, lol
Now Wokal is mind-reading me and referencing shit I've never seen before. Had to look this up, turns out someone said something about birds being white supremacy.
Remember this, it'll be crucial for Wokal's conclusion: I am not charitable to others' views
Before we get to the last part of the thread though, let’s take a look at how many of my objections debunking Rufo’s dogshit book @wokal_distance IGNORED ENTIRELY.
By my count, here are the first seven:
And 3 more. So in a thread that is supposed to show that I don’t treat Rufo fairly enough, the evidence presented for this is an utterly inconsequential mistake (which I explicitly corrected) and then a series of quibbles with the facade of intellectual rigor.
Wokal tells us there is a “subtle sleight of hand,” and then “a fallacy going on” because Rufo explicitly rejected white identitarianism...
Two weeks after I posted the thread. 🤦♂️
In the first screenshot there he also tries to say the parallel I am drawing is not justified because the White people discussed in the paper are talking about the right to culture, not civil rights.
FACT CHECK: False. The right to white pride/culture is separate. I was clear:
Wokal slips from “CRT is critical of mainstream liberal civil rights discourse” — just as Martin Luther King Jr. was — to “CRT says rights don’t work, gotta try something else.”
Just so lazy. I provide specific examples of Rufo’s claims mirroring KKK claims
“Didn’t deal with everything Sam said”—understatement, but I appreciate the honesty. Btw, I never said Rufo was a white supremacist; I said he exemplifies 4/5 tenets.
Chris Rufo is absolutely a liar; that’s been proven conclusively elsewhere. Like here:
Wokal’s criticism of me on Lindsay and Pluckrose is that I am too uncharitable to them. (It’s also following up a tweet where I admittedly took an L for phrasing the initial claim very poorly.)
Here are two fairly ordinary paragraphs from Pluckrose (first two) and Lindsay (second two). Who’s got the problem with being charitable? Or is it only bad when the other team does it, @wokal_distance? I only ask you remain faithful to your principles. [fin]
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This is a thread on the 2022 right-wing documentary UNCLE TOM II, a film based entirely on the worldview and source material of the John Birch Society.
It has been promoted by Charlie Kirk & Jack Posobiec as proof that MLK & the civil rights movement were secretly Communist. 🧵
1. Leading up to MLK Day this year, Kirk & Posobiec decided they were going to abandon the standard Republican ritual (quoting King out of context, depicting the civil rights hero as a colorblind conservative).
Instead, they wanted to vilify MLK and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
2. On the eve of MLK Day, Posobiec was promoting UNCLE TOM II and its narrator Chad O. Jackson as authoritative sources on King's connections to "Communists."
Kirk had already promoted UNCLE TOM II on Real America's Voice in 2022 after the film was released.
Because everyone is talking about Ibram Kendi: it is so deeply upsetting to me that when reading groups and book lists were popping up after George Floyd was murdered it was always the work of people like Kendi & DiAngelo. Imagine if everybody read Charles Mills instead 🥲
Robin DiAngelo made a shit ton of money telling other white people that white people are basically incurably racist and Ibram Kendi made a shit ton of money basically claiming to be the sole arbiter of what racism truly is and refused to acknowledge any critiques of his views
I get a bit more detailed with my critiques here, but I ultimately do have a lot more to say, been wanting to write something about this and maybe I will soon (if any media sites/mags are interested, DM me!)
Chris Rufo took a break from suing college students for "political violence" (read: getting spit on his shoes) to argue that conservatives should turn to Nixon "as our guide" in mobilizing a "counterrevolution" against things like CRT and DEI.
A quick thread on Nixon & Rufo 🧵
It is interesting that Rufo venerates Nixon, because Rufo likes to talk about how he is deeply opposed to racism, often pointing to the fact that he is in an interracial marriage and has biracial children.
Nixon was deeply racist. Ex 1: Nixon & Reagan discuss African diplomats
Being charitable, you might think that the Reagan phone call is not enough to call Nixon racist.
Ex 2: Nixon explains that, while he is against abortion in some cases, he thinks it is necessary to prevent the birth of interracial ("a black and a white") children.
The YouTube channel for Larry Elder’s documentary films uploaded the John Birch Society propaganda film ANARCHY USA, which claims the civil rights movement “is simply part of a worldwide movement, organized and directed by Communists, to enslave all mankind”
A thread, w/ clips🧵
ANARCHY USA was written & directed in 1966 by JBS member G. Edward Griffin, a prolific propagandist & first-rate quack. Griffin believes that HIV “doesn’t even exist” & that cancer is a dietary deficiency that can be cured with “an essential food compound” mediamatters.org/glenn-beck/who…
This upload of ANARCHY USA has become one of the most popular videos on the Uncle Tom YouTube channel. It has been viewed over 200k times in just eight months, whereas the film has been viewed fewer than 40k times in seven years on the official John Birch Society YouTube channel.
"Cultural Marxism" has entered mainstream political discourse, appearing in recent speeches by DeSantis and Hawley, Fox News broadcasts, and right-wing media from Breitbart to Ben Shapiro.
This is a thread, with clips, on the 25-year history of "Cultural Marxism" on the Right 🧵
1. We begin with the arch-conservative activist and TV host, Bill Lind.
He began his 1998 talk "The Origins of Political Correctness" by saying college campuses have become so authoritarian that he'd be put "literally on trial" for joking about women and shopping carts
2. Lind says political correctness is seen as something to laugh at, but in fact "it's deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead... the disease of ideology."