False Consciousness & Repressive Tolerance

     When some on the purported Right say they will “fight like the Left”, this is why they mean, as James Lindsay notes, quoted in full full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds.

Neomarxist Herbert Marcuse, from “Repressive Tolerance,” 1965:

“Withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally, intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right—these anti-democratic notions respond to the actual development of the democratic society which has destroyed the basis for universal tolerance. The conditions under which tolerance can again become a liberating and humanizing force have still to be created. When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual, in his consciousness, his needs, when heteronomous interests occupy him before he can experience his servitude, then the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin at the place of entrance, there where the false consciousness takes form (or rather: is systematically formed)—it must begin with stopping the words and images which feed this consciousness. To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media. Where the false consciousness has become prevalent in national and popular behavior, it translates itself almost immediately into practice: the safe distance between ideology and reality, repressive thought and repressive action, between the word of destruction and the deed of destruction is dangerously shortened. Thus, the break through the false consciousness may provide the Archimedean point for a larger emancipation—at an infinitesimally small spot, to be sure, but it is on the enlargement of such small spots that the chance of change depends.”

To see what the Woke Right is doing against Daily Wire, just reverse the directions Right and Left there, realize they consider DW as producing liberal false consciousness in a conservative garb that they ultimately want to censor so the average conservative won’t be fed those words and images, and that Matt represents a point at which they believe they can break through the false consciousness peddled by DW.

Matt Walsh is the Archimedean point upon which they believe they can leverage Daily Wire off the table.

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News of the Week (June 15th, 2025)

 

News of the Week for June 15th, 2025


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Happy Flag Day, 2025

     Happy Flag Day!

     There are many historical flags associated with the United States, notably during the Westward Expansion of our country.

     One such flag is the General Frémont “Indian Peace” Flag 1842.

“This Flag was the regimental banner of western explorer John C. Frémont and was carried on the first of his several trips west between 1841 and 1846. Although, according to his journals, he said he later carried a US flag into California, it isn’t clear if it was this particular flag or another he carried.

“Frémont was married to Jessie Benton, daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, an influential senator from Missouri. According to most sources Jessie made Frémont’s flag by hand. On the plain white canton she drew an eagle which held a Native American “peace pipe” in its claws instead of the traditional wreath and arrows. She also outlined 26 stars in blue in two rows of 13. After his first expedition she sewed grey silk backing onto the flag to which she centered an arch of letters spelling “Rocky Mountains 1841.” She did this to commemorate his first expedition. She also placed the image of a butterfly (or bee) flying above the letter “N.” […] The Frémont flag is preserved in the Autry National Center in Pasadena, California.

“This flag was later adopted by the City of Fremont, Michigan, as their official city flag when they incorporated in 1875. There are 26 stars on Frémont’s flag and Michigan was the 26th State to join the Union, so it seemed a perfect fit.”

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Quick Takes – Mandatory & Prohibited In Academia: Equity Lens For Football; Illegal Race-Based Admissions; Cultural Items Forbidden From View

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: Whatever isn’t prohibited is mandatory.

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

     Apparently you aren’t deemed fit to coach football unless you view the game ant its players with wokeness through an “equity lens”.

“Should Governor Tim Walz ever hope to return to being an assistant football coach in Mankato, he might look to Minnesota State University for his next gig.

“The public university seeks a defensive assistant coach for its football team. But while it would be “preferred” that the applicant has experience coaching a defensive position and recruiting athletes, it is mandatory they embrace DEI.

“‘Demonstrated ability to serve a diverse population and apply an equity lens, including social justice and/or anti-racism, to the role,’ is listed as a ‘minimum’ qualification for the job.

“‘Ability to coach and teach highly-talented student-athletes to succeed in a challenging academic environment,’ on the other hand, is simply a ‘preferred’ qualification.”

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Wokeness vs. Classical Liberalism

     Liberals, Communists, and Woke totalitarians are often lumped together. But there are differences between Wokeness and Classical Liberalism, particularly when it comes to “systems of oppression” and the “false consiousness” that purportedly protects it which can only be overthrown through “critical consiousness” and the praxis involved therewith. As “Wokal Distance” explains, which is quoted in full full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds:

Acknowledging then Criticising power structures or dominant cultural beliefs does not make someone woke.

Classical liberalism does not deny that power structures can exist and can be used to oppress various groups nor does it deny that some beliefs become dominant in the culture.

What separates liberalism and wokeness is this:

Wokeness thinks knowledge is constructed/created by powerful institutions and people with their own views, interests, agendas, and ideologies…and the knowledge these powerful people create operates in the service of their own interests & is perpetuated via discourses and culture. These systems of power socially conditions people to accept the status quo while determining what people are capable of thinking and knowing. Further, these systems of power are invisible unless someone has been trained to see them through “critical consciousness, and unless one has his consciousness transformed they will have “false consciousness” and the oppressive system of power will remain invisible. The way to deal with this situation is to use power to take control of the apparatus of cultural creation and education in order to determine what people think and make sure the “correct” ideas always have dominance in the culture.

Liberalism does not think this. Liberals do not think culture has the power to brainwash people or determine what people think. Culture can certainly apply social pressure to people, and it might make some ideas more popular (and therefore more accessible to the masses) than other ideas, but it cannot brainwash or socially condition people the way wokeness thinks it can. Liberals do not think the state can determine public opinion by the use of power. Secondly, Liberalism believes systems of power are really quite visible, and proving their existence is a matter of setting fourth evidence that these systems exist and providing arguments for their existence. According to liberalism one does not need to “transform their consciousness” or “take the redpill” in order to see an oppressive system, it is merely a matter of fact that it adjudicates using reason, evidence, logic, and rationality. Finally, the solution to oppressive systems to remove the ability of authoritarians to impose their will on others, to mandate their beliefs, or to censor the beliefs of other people.

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Overreach Against The 1st Amendment

     Drawings are not people and people with drawings shouldn’t be treated like someone who hurts an actual child. One might think that this makes obvious sense, but then one likely isn’t an elected politician.

     Your humble author has warned about censorious overreach:

“A clear example of this conflation comes from a The Daily Signal article by Tony Kinnett. Much of the article quite rightfully goes after LGBTQ&c. propaganda that tries to normalize kinky sex and transgendersim amongst elementary school children and earlier—often as part of formal classroom teaching materials—but conflates that with a Seinen Japanese Manga that has nothing to do with wokeness, LGBTQ&c. ideology, or even promoting anything sexually deviant (or really anything sexual at all).

“Why did they lump in a manga adaptation and interpretation of a popular light novel series with clearly pro-woke propaganda? Boobies. [sic] And that it showed evil goblins attacking females (but never showing the actual sexual assault). This does not and can not normalize anything sexual, deviant or otherwise, when it shows rape to be absolutely evil and the rapist as needing to be killed for their evil. There is more focus on the horror and evil of rape and especially of the lasting psychological damage that a rape survivor experiences.”

     Under SB20 in Texas, as enrolled, an “obscene” drawing of a character that subjectively appears to be under 18 will result in a “jail felony” which mandates that “first-time offenders convicted under this law to a minimum of five years in prison, simply for owning or viewing such material”. It reads, in part:

“(b) A person commits an offense if the person: (1)   knowingly possesses, accesses with intent to view, or promotes obscene visual material containing a depiction that appears to be of a child younger than 18 years of age engaging in activities described by Section 43.21(a)(1)(B), regardless of whether the depiction is an image of an actual child, a cartoon or animation, or an image created using an artificial intelligence application or other computer software”

     Note that a sexy photograph of an adult with a petite or youthful body is considered less egregious than a drawing of the same person, as the bill goes on to talk about using “an image of an actual child younger than 18 years of age at the time the image was made”, but not actual photos of youthful looking adults—a distinction not made with… drawings.

     Under this Texas law, the aforementioned Goblin Slayer could get someone sent to jail on sex crimes charges, since fifteen is considered the age of majority for humans in Goblin Slayer and the minimum age to be an adventurer… and goblins are noted to attack newly minted adventurers. Even more ridiculous is the the idea of a person being sent to jail for having a drawing of a flat-chested elf, over a millennium old, in a bikini.

She’s over 2000 years old. If anything, the FBI should be protecting you from being taken advantage of by her.

     To put it simply, a drawing isn’t a real person, adult or child, and drawing do not have human rights nor are capable of crimes being committed against them.

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News of the Week (June 8th, 2025)

 

News of the Week for June 8th, 2025


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Firing Line Friday: What Does PEN Have to Offer?

     In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.

     The question of art and oppression, of description or proscription, is long an ongoing question.   Let us look back forty-years ago when Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut, who were raising money for the New York conference of PEN (the international society of poets, essayists, editors, and novelists) discuss with William F. Buckley, Jr. the question of what does PEN have to offer?

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Quick Takes – Euthanasia Expanding Everywhere: Extreme Laws In France; A Human Right In Estonia; MAID For Kids in Manitoba

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: Everywhere death spreads, normalized.

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

Death, Rx

     France seems to be hell bent on going all out with euthanasia, or nearly so.

“French MPs are preparing to vote on a law that would legalise euthanasia and assisted suicide. In the final days of the parliamentary debate, as the proposal’s provisions were reviewed, some of the most outrageous articles were discussed and, unfortunately, many were adopted.

“For several days, the voices denouncing the text have been growing. The proposal that MPs are preparing to vote on will make France one of the most permissive countries in this area, alongside countries that have sunk into increasingly serious abuses of ‘assisted dying,’ such as Canada and Belgium.

“Based on the model that already exists for abortion, a ‘crime of obstruction’ has been created, which will allow the prosecution of anyone who wishes to prevent or attempt to prevent euthanasia, whether by action, words, or access to information. Deterring a suffering loved one from receiving a lethal injection could earn you up to two years in prison and a €30,000 fine. The penalty sought is even larger than the one for abortion.

“Conversely, the symmetrical possibility of a ‘crime of incitement to euthanasia,’ i.e., the act of pushing someone to request death, has not been retained, even though experience in other countries has shown that psychological, family, and financial pressures abound for those who are considering assisted suicide.”

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Blowing Up The Rules

     Increasingly, we are seeing more and more people declare that “there are no rules” and that we must “fight like the Left” to the point of adopting Leftist thinking and frameworks, both of which are necessary prerequisites to engage in “tactics” of Gramsci, Marcuse, or Alinsky. The line of “thinking” is that everything has already been blown up by the Left so that we have to “join ‘em to beat ‘em” at their own game. That this ignores the little fact that the “rules for radicals” or “repressive tolerance” are tailor made to achieve goals antithetical to America seems beyond too many who foolishly believe that they can highjack the immanentization to steer it towards their own chosen eschaton, by sheer manliness or oracular intervention.

     To put it bluntly, NO, Marx or his pseudo-intellectual dependents did not have any “good ideas” or any “good points”/insights into society or power. In reality, the adoption of Leftist thinking is nothing less than a triumph for the Left, for the Right has become them… the debate merely one of who is the bolshevik and who is the menshevik.

     What the Gramscians did is replace the old with their framework via the “Long March Through The Institutions”, waiting for the Right get frustrated and toss out “the rules”. The Right only had superficial normalcy left; without those rules, they had only that new framework left—the framework of, by, and for the Left.

     Totalitarian is, ultimately, in the mind, and one can’t break free because of internal capture, and nothing underlying to replace it. The superficial means nothing, at that point, at least nothing of true value or worth.

     Many on the Right, purported or otherwise, only opposed things because they were outside that superficial layer of normalcy. It was alien only because it was alien and due to the momentum and habit, once it became normal in society it became normal for them individually, because the underlying fundamentals upon which lay “normalcy” had changed.

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