A thread about a pattern of Woke infiltration, so that it might be spotted and stopped.
Woke Marxists use a suite of techniques that are called "entryism" (the art of entering) to infiltrate institutions and take them over from within. newdiscourses.com/2024/01/how-th…
There are five basic stages in this model of infiltration: 1) Demand access. 2) Demand accommodation. 3) Demand a seat at the table (demand power). 4) Demand to run the table (demand controlling power). 5) Demand to run the room (demand total power).
The first stage is to demand access. You hear this in much of their language. "Equity," even though it means the redistribution of shares, is framed through some linguistic tricks as equalizing access. "Inclusion" is about including Woke Marxists in things.
No organization or institution or group, even under the most liberal of policies, has any obligation to admit troublemakers. Critical consciousness (Woke) is a troublemaker. The Woke therefore have to demand access to be allowed in, usually through bids that are hard to turn down
The general formula of Marxism is to operationalize "bitch moves" that polite society doesn't know how to say no to without looking like a jerk. You see it everywhere. So, if you don't give them access, they accuse you of shutting them out for a nasty reason: racism or something.
If you admit the Woke Marxist access, the trouble will begin at once because they'll factionalize your org from within. Woke Marxists, like all Marxists (and Cluster B personalities) are troublemakers. You need to realize you're under no obligation to let them in on their demand.
Once inside, they'll demand accommodation. You'll have to allow them to be disruptive troublemakers, be asked to change the rules, etc., in the name of "inclusion" and "belonging." There are entire suites of memes and cartoons describing this dynamic.
You let the radicals in, and now you have to bend your organization around making them feel comfortable, welcomed, honored, respected, etc., usually on constantly shifting terms. The demand for accommodation begins a process of renormalization, in other words.
Renormalization occurs when a group reorients itself around a highly intolerant or disagreeable member who won't accommodate in return. A paradigm example is a vegan teenage daughter who forces a whole family to reorient its diet because she simply won't eat anything else.
You can expect at least two things during the demand for accommodation phase: (a) they'll use the same bitch moves against any attempt to refuse (it's "sexist" not to accommodate feminist hags), and (b) they'll use the factionalization they always make to leverage against you.
By the time the demands for accommodation are presented, you'll find that a surprising cohort of your organization is already at least kinda on the Woke Marxists' side. They've been working to spread critical consciousness (Woke) and gain allies from the day they got in.
Imagine a church that lets in an envious associate pastor who goes around the congregation quietly making comments and then relationships against the head pastor in order to do an ouster. Same exact mentality, but Woke Marxism is tailored to do that process deeply and effectively
By the time they're demanding accommodation, in other words, you're already infiltrated. You have to take the hits of the "bitch moves" and remove the people demanding accommodation or, at least, tell them no policies will change and that they can accept them as they are or leave
As their accommodation grows, so will the power of their faction, and they'll begin to leverage that to demand a seat at the table. They don't demand total power; they demand a say. Their faction demands representation in the leadership ranks. You will lose if you let this happen
They will not be content with a little bit of say, a single voice on a committee. They will quickly leverage that position to use "bitch moves" to undermine the authority of the existing power structure and demand more representation while changing as much policy as possible.
The demand for a seat at the table will quickly become a snowballing demand for more seats until they are demanding to run the table. This is the phase in a company or institution where they start building a DEI bureaucracy that develops and enforces the Woke Marxist policy line.
The goal at this stage is to build a full-blown administrative apparatus that manages the entire org. If they're building this, you are pretty much screwed. (Stop hiring college graduates!) Your organization is probably toast, and most normal people will start bleeding off.
If they gain this kind of administrative power, they will demand to run and manage everything. In effect, they already are by the time they're building out the bureaucracy that will do it, but it will become explicit policy. At that point, the original org is a zombie.
They will mismanage the organization to do Woke Marxist goals (mostly, break things, make more Woke Marxists, and infiltrate other orgs) until its base of stolen capital (financial, cultural, social) collapses, at which point they'll blame "racism" and attack neighboring orgs.
You can see this part of the process, the secret Step (6), playing out in the wake of Claudine Gay's disgrace and resignation from Harvard's presidency. They're melting down as Harvard bleeds capital of all kinds and blaming "racism" to attack all legitimate academic work.
This is when the cordyceps fungus blooms, more or less, and spreads its spores because the bug it infected in the first place is completely and totally drained. Woke Marxism is basically the parasitic function of socioeconomic affairs. This pattern plays out repeatedly.
If you want to stop this process, you have to stop it early. Refusing access to troublemakers for being troublemakers and making clear that critical consciousness (Woke) means making trouble is a step you can probably make now but couldn't two years ago. People are waking up!
Refusing accommodation for Woke troublemaking is also something you can do now much more easily than you could a couple years ago, and it's easier for people to swallow as acceptable than limiting access, which can easily be spun as being discriminatory.
Once you start accommodating, you pretty much lose, though. It's really too late once you're on the "belonging" railroad. You can try to keep troublemakers out of power and from gaining power, but they've already arranged internal conditions against you, and it's gonna be ugly.
The most important thing is to set policies that prevent the demand for accommodation, which if held strongly and seriously will mostly solve the access problem automatically. Wokes don't like resistance and will, on their own, look for softer targets. RIP them, I guess.
Having clear policies that normies understand to be "inclusive" or whatever can really help in this effort to refuse additional accommodation. You are ultimately fighting a PR battle against "bitch moves," so seek to have a strong foundation in equality and good work environment
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From my Woke Encyclopedia, an explanation of the "friend-enemy distinction" of Carl Schmitt, which is the Woke political logic. Link at the end!🧵
(1/13) The friend-enemy distinction refers to the cornerstone object of the political and judicial philosophy of a German theorist named Carl Schmitt, who wrote a number of works of right-wing political philosophy and thought before becoming such an enthusiastic Nazi in 1933, just after Adolf Hitler took power, that he earned the informal title “the Crown Jurist of the Third Reich.”
Though most of his significant political thinking was done both before and after he was a Nazi, during the years when he was a part of Hitler’s National Socialist movement and Party, he contributed strongly to the legal theory that justified the Nazi “total state,” including writing the 1933 piece that gets rendered in English as “The Legal Basis for the Total State,” which is significantly based upon the friend-enemy distinction.
Friend-enemy distinction:
(2/13) Schmitt’s thought is primarily of interest on the Woke Right, where he is a favored thinker and model political mind. He is vigorously forwarded for a handful of his political concepts, perhaps most visibly his “friend-enemy distinction” as the essential criterion of what makes politics political. This idea is first presented and developed in full detail in his 1927/32 book The Concept of the Political.
Friend-enemy distinction:
(3/13) For Schmitt, what makes the politics political is the distinction between (public) friend and (public) enemy, where enemies are defined as those who are interested in destroying one’s way of life and friends are defined as those who are willing to band together in its defense.
Schmitt specifically compares the essential nature of this distinction in politics to the distinction between good and evil in morality, beautiful and ugly in aesthetics, and profitable versus non-profitable in economics.
That is, politics is only political to the degree that it recognizes the possibility of factions that exist in mutual enmity underwritten by the potentially existential threat of violence. Of course, that means that Schmitt believes the essential criterion of politics is war, which he reveals also in part by making his point by completing the identity contained in von Clausewitz’s famous remark that “war is politics by other means.”
All radical movements find themselves in a pinch: they can only really advance when people don't know their true intentions, but they can only really advance by going public with what they're doing. It's an intrinsic dilemma that only rare figures in rare circumstances can win.
Mamdani is a good example of a rare figure (extremely good at presenting himself disingenuously while looking real) in rare circumstances (terrible primary opponent, then running against a terrible combination of Cuomo/Sliwa, then still not winning by huge margins).
The primary reason NYC got Mamdani isn't something to do with the electorate, the climate, or anything else. Mamdani, with tons of weird money, ran a very strong campaign (rare figure) in very weird circumstances, most of which were candidate-specific, not conditional.
Fun fact: If you had a time machine and could go back in time to this day in 2019 but couldn't take any physical evidence with you, you could not convince almost anyone to take the Woke Left threat seriously and would get mocked and yelled at for trying, even by friends.
Your left-leaning friends (if you have any) would make fun of you for not getting it. Your right-leaning friends would laugh at you for making a mountain out of a molehill. No one really understood there was a serious problem with the Woke Left until after summer 2020.
The reason I know this is because I was there and doing this full time already by that point in my life.
Introducing to you two of the "intellectual" Woke Right's favorite contemporary thinkers: Patrick Deneen (left) and R.R. Reno. Here, they demonstrate their inability to see what is plainly in front of them—a Marxist insurgency through Leftist elitist capture—because of their preference for theories of cultural rot and decay.
These kinds of theories about why we are where we are aren't just dangerous misdiagnosed; they're also self-flattering humblebrags, saying in effect, "things got bad because everyone went to shit except people like us who are better than that." Typical Woke virtue signaling except in "modest" conservative form.
Yes, they are popular with Woke Right propagandists.
It's Saturday, and the world is a mess. Perhaps it's a good time for a little humor with a point. To that end, allow me to reintroduce the "Grievance Studies Affair" to the world. This will be a longer thread (20+ posts) introducing every single paper of the Grievance Studies Affair individually in a new, never-seen-before way.
The Grievance Studies Affair (or, "Sokal Squared") was an academic hoax project done seven years ago by @peterboghossian, @HPluckrose, and I with the help of @MikeNayna, who also produced a documentary (The Reformers, 2023) about what we affectionately named "the project" as we did it.
It involved writing 20+ academic hoax articles and sending them to peer-reviewed journals in the "theoretical humanities," things like gender studies and sexuality studies, to reveal a kind of ideological academic rabies we now refer to as "Woke (Leftism)". In the end 7 of these papers were accepted, 4 were actually published, 1 received recognition for excellence in scholarship in the field of "feminist geography," and 7 more were still under peer review on October 2, 2018, when the Wall Street Journal blew our cover.
What we learned from the project is ultimately that peer review is only as good as the peers. If the peers are corrupted in some way, that corruption will be validated as "knowledge" and passed into the intellectual foundations of society through the existing system. The implications are vast. Of course, while we revealed a form of ideological corruption in academia, there are other forms as well: political, economic, corporate, etc., all of which matter in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons.
While the Grievance Studies Affair itself is now over six and a half years old and thus an article of history, I don't think it has ever been more relevant. To this day, it still has not been reckoned with in the slightest. Our knowledge-producing institutions have ideological rabies and corporatist cancers that will be our undoing. Until we see complete reform or replacement of much of our research, higher-education, and primary and secondary education institutions and apparatuses, we are at risk of complete societal collapse. It really is that serious, and absolutely none of it has been stopped yet.
This thread isn't just a reminder of the Grievance Studies Affair, however. It's also an introduction to a Grievance Studies Portal I have published on @NewDiscourses through much effort of my team. In this thread, each of the 20+ papers will be introduced individually with direct links to their new home on New Discourses so that you can read them and laugh (or cry, or be horrified) and share them with ease. I hope you appreciate them and all the hard work that went into them and their publication here.
For my part, it has been a great opportunity to take a day to reflect and reminisce about one of the most challenging and most fun times of my entire life. I don't think I will ever be blessed with the opportunity to work so hard while laughing my head off ever again, nor will I ever regain the innocence I had going into this project. I thought it was funny when I started. By the middle, I realized it wasn't just serious but a legitimate threat to civilization. I changed my entire life as a result, and not a lot of that has been so funny.
I hope you enjoy this thread. Below, you will find the release video Mike Nayna produced that we put out on October 2, 2018, minutes after the Wall Street Journal outed us. It has been seen millions upon millions of times now and legitimately has changed the world, just not enough. It will serve as your reminder and introduction to the absolute insanity you'll find in the posts below.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter. Like I said from the start, mostly I hope you'll find this at least as hilarious as it is terrifying, and maybe you'll share it with your friends.
The Grievance Studies Affair has never been more relevant.
The New Discourses Grievance Studies Affair portal is located at the link below. In it, you'll find information about each of us, our motivations, our original write-ups and analysis about the project, as well as every single paper and its peer-reviewed commentary, as available (not all papers made it to peer review).
I hope you will find it a useful and sharable resource about the plague of ideological rabies that has taken over our institutions. newdiscourses.com/grievance-stud…
What became the Grievance Studies Affair began with a trial-balloon paper that @peterboghossian and I wrote in late 2016, hilariously titled "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct." It's one of the funniest things I've ever written, rivaled only by a couple of the later Grievance Studies Papers (YMMV).
It is not housed on the Grievance Studies Affair @NewDiscourses portal, but perhaps it should be, because it wasn't part of the Grievance Studies Affair properly. It might be its second most-famous contribution, however.
In the paper, Peter and I took inspiration from a real paper that had been published in the highest-ranking gender studies journal, Gender & Society, characterizing menstrual blood as a social construct. We argued that penises are not best thought of as male reproductive organs, in part because "pre-operative trans women" also have them (which was effectively repeated in the Supreme Court argumentation this week in the Skrmetti case). Instead, they should be thought of as social constructs that create toxic masculinity and rape culture and cause all the problems in the world, especially climate change.
This paper was ultimately accepted by means of a related but passed-over academic publishing scandal in a (likely) predatory journal called Cogent Social Sciences after a clear sham peer review process after being rejected and transferred from a masculinities journal called NORMA.
Because of the low quality of the journal and the one-off nature of the stunt, it was left ambiguous if Peter and I had proved any point about gender studies and related fields ("Grievance Studies" fields) at all. We were admonished to write more papers, target serious journals, and be more accurate in our claims, and we accepted this challenge happily.
"The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" was published in Cogent Social Sciences on May 19, 2017, and by June 7 Peter and I had resolved to start the Grievance Studies Affair to do the job right. skeptic.com/content/files/…