Authoritarianism is frequently (but not always) explained and measured using a three-factor scale that measures "conventionalism," "authoritarian aggression," and "authoritarian submission." These are worth knowing about, particularly in this day and age. 🧵 Conventionalism is the first of the three typically recognized authoritarian traits. What it refers to is a tendency to follow conventions and to expect (or force) other people to follow the same conventions. These conventions can be defined in a wide variety of ways.

A huge lure that hooks people into the Woke Right is what we might call "the hope you're not allowed to have." Someone can sell a hope that force or authoritarianism or fascism can stop the apparently unstoppable march of Marxism and radicalize by saying it's unfairly withheld. Frankly, all totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies use this mechanism. Marcuse talked about it with "liberating tolerance," for example, and the "utopian possibility" of a liberated socialist state. The mechanism (sales pitch) is pretty devious and radicalizes people hard.

Something everyone needs to understand about identity politics and "collective identities" (aka, "collective justice," aka "social justice") is that they are intrinsically scams and will intrinsically end up led by people who screw over the people "of identity" who support them. Identity politics is not what happened in the Civil Rights Movement. What happened in the Civil Rights Movement was a bid by groups to not have to be treated as groups. The slogan black men carried on signs in Memphis was "I am a man."

It's exciting to see research you started getting taken further and more definitive. My friend @iamlisalogan has just released a bombshell report (linked below) about the spiritualist, in fact occultist, nature of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), that proves it's dark religious. She calls her long, detailed (and unbelievable) report "The REAL (religious) Origins of Social Emotional Learning," and it's on her admirable Substack. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but I'll do a thread with some highlights here.
lisalogan.substack.com/p/the-real-rel…

Tbh, no they aren't. There's a mighty demon perched on top of their conservatism, and it's getting worse, not better. Maybe if Trump can deliver sufficiently it will temper them, but we're in for a very, very dangerous decade to come.

https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1896570097327841419

Almost every young man I talk to in the conservative movement, but far fewer of the young women, is at least open-minded about the idea of being ruled by a dictator, so long as that dictator agrees with their values (or pretends to). Sympathy to fascism is relatively high too.

Communists are completely wrong about the most fundamental aspects of capitalism. They argue that capitalism works off (and creates/maintains) scarcity, but it actually works from and maintains surplus. As usual, it's exactly the opposite, a complete inversion. 🧵 The essence of capitalism is that one (an individual) can accrue and use one's capital as one will, including to increase one's capital. Capitalism intrinsically and practically creates value as a result, and the mechanism by which it does so is not scarcity but surplus.

Jacques Ellul wrote one of the most important and clarifying books ever written on propaganda. In it, he insists a certain kind of person is the most susceptible to propaganda, giving three traits beyond his own ridiculous belief that he's immune to it. Let's take a look. 🧵 Ellul gives three traits that make someone not just susceptible to propaganda but also dependent on it (!). For us, they will be very unsettling. Before talking about those, though, he also explains that we generally misunderstand propaganda as being like tall tales and lies.

I just returned from the ARC conference in London where I had countless conversations with people face-to-face about the "Woke Right." While most by far were moderately to extremely supportive, some were duly challenging. I think it's worth talking about them and their variety.🧵 I will start by reiterating that (a) I had a LOT of conversations about the subject of the "Woke Right," far, far more than I wanted to, so it is definitely being widely recognized and discussed, and (b) that most of these were moderately to extremely supportive of my fight.

In the midst of the USAID scandal flowing to Christianity Today and, apparently, Russell Moore, who tried to gently transform the Southern Baptist Convention to soft Woke up through 2019, I have made a curious discovery: they did some of it with the occultist Fetzer Institute.
As reported in the Baptist Press back in 2019, the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberties Committee (ERLC), headed by Russell Moore and with the collaboration of many notable others, coordinated with the occultist Fetzer Institute to produce a report.
baptistpress.com/resource-libra…

Unlike @MikeBenzCyber, I'm not a big expert on how USAID operated, but the big picture is that if there was something destabilizing going on pretty much anywhere, USAID found ways to dump American taxpayer money (usually through networks of NGOs) into that destabilization. Woke stuff is extremely destabilizing, including abroad, hence pushing money into tons of Woke "research" and initiatives all around the globe, including here at home. That's the purpose of Woke stuff: destabilization and subversion. De facto, that was the purpose of USAID.

The fun thing about having lots of rumors swirling around about you is having to take treks into "None Of Your Business" zones publicly sometimes.

There's a rumor @SovMichael is my "weird benefactor" (as Chris Rufo put it to me recently, which brings us here). That's not true.🧵 Normally, I don't think it's anyone's business but ours to talk about our finances and business relationship, but since Rufo seems to have believed the propaganda about my relationship with Michael, as have many others, I'm going to address it. Again. Ughh.

Some of us were telling you all that Christian Nationalism is 10000% an op the Woke Right radicals were falling into or exploiting and delivering the receipts that the other ("critical") side of this op was working in alignment with the feds for a long time now, no money added. People like Auron MacIntyre and William Wolfe, inter alia, are the right-hand side of a "Christian Nationalist" scissor operation that had people like Russell Moore on its other side all along.

Christian Nationalism is 10000% an op, even with one arm of the scissors now exposed.

The power arm that stands to gain the most from the Woke Right, with which it is deeply intertwined, is called "National Conservatism" (NatCon). It was created by an Israeli and dominates the "dissident" faction of American conservative politics.
Seems weird that Hazony, an observant Israeli Jew, gave Wolfe's Christian Nationalism book such a glowing endorsement outside of some cynical political play given that it would shut down Jewish beliefs in America if taken seriously. Maybe Hazony's interests aren't American, tho.

Here's the simplest way I can explain Woke Right ideology now 🧵

Imagine how Woke thinks about some "oppressed" group like black people or gays. Woke Right is almost identical but for their idea of the (oppressed) "nation," which is specifically a people, not just a state. The "almost" is that they also invert the moral polarity of the oppression hierarchy explicitly. Roughly, the Woke Left thinks all oppression is bad but some is necessary, and the Woke Right thinks their oppression only is necessary and good.

I often hear that we need to abandon our "libertarian" (meaning constitutional) principles in order to win, or that we should do so because we need to "like winning." Let's talk about winning. As my Aussie friends say, let's check the scoreboard, mates. 🧵 If we're going to talk about winning, we need to talk about what we're winning, but let's look at the scoreboard first.

The "we need to win" crowd told us consistently before the election that we "can't vote our way out of this" and that "voting harder" won't work. It did.

Yesterday, I did a thread about "post-liberalism" (after liberty) and discussed its unfair conflation of two traditions that both get called "liberal" and touched on how those two regard the "self." Most found it helpful. Some got upset. The trans issue adds much relief. 🧵 Without getting into it all again, the two traditions that get called "liberal" are American and Continental (or French-German). The first is rooted in realism and the second is rooted in idealism, which is anti-real in its metaphysics (in practice, often constructivist).

We all talk a lot about "Cluster-B personality disorders" these days, and there's likely a very simple reason why: social media facilitates their amplification. There is almost no playground better for these destructive disorders than social media, and the consequences are huge. Cluster-B personality disorders are the particularly nasty ones: histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial, and borderline. They are stable psychological deformations, at least by the time adulthood is reached, and they cause disruption and destruction everywhere they go.

So I've been listening to some of the arguments made by so-called "post-liberals" (notably Prof. Patrick Deneen) a little more closely than before and want to speak to a persistent confusion I see in the foundation of their work that I almost have to wonder if it's deliberate. 🧵 The problem, and the allure of "post-liberalism" (including to our current Vice President) is obviously that "liberal" is a highly contentious term, and one has to wonder what it means if we're going to go "post" (beyond) it. It means VERY distinct things to different thinkers.

I so glad I did a podcast series about this nonsense some time ago (links below) and entirely by coincidence chose the exact same stock photo for the card. What they're doing to our universities is making them into seminaries for the UN's evil "Sustainability" cult. See below!

https://twitter.com/BucMon21/status/1875741917675450511

These are actually over two years old now! Two and a quarter!
newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strang…

I have to offer some thanks to my detractors like this one for telling on themselves by saying things like "a coming out party [ed.: gay] for the ascendant elite of the right."

We should realize this is how these too-online dorks see themselves and talk about elite theory. 🧵 Before hitting elite theory, let me remark about the "too-online dorks" remark. There's a poison dorks are susceptible to when they start being seen as "cool" for their ideas and get moderately big social media accounts. They start thinking they're an "ascendant elite."

It's worth talking more generally about why it's unproductive, though not wholly incorrect, to frame out Critical Race Theory and its activities and consequences as being "anti-White racism." To really get it requires understanding that good active measures have two dumps. 🧵 Rather than talking about CRT and the actual fact of its derivative anti-white animus and outright racism first, let's talk about active measures and their "dumps."

Another name for an active measure is a "psyops." The "dump" of a psyops is where you want it to take people.