News of the Week for Sept. 6th, 2020
News of the Week for Sept. 6th, 2020
Sohrab Ahmari has embraced a manichean “if your not with us then you are against us” attitude that Antifa would agree with, and gone all in with adopting the “tear it down” strategy of the Left under the deluded idea that by merely fighting back, total victory will be achieved and lack of a “f**k you WAR” attitude is proof of being the enemy.
“It is simply this: that the political left neither loves you nor shares many loves with you, certainly not the love of neutral norms and procedures that have long been the stock-in-trade of the center-right establishment. . . . To be sure, some ‘moderate’ liberals still mouth the old rhetoric — “free speech”, “free inquiry”, etc — and get canceled for their trouble. But what their movement as a whole seeks is the brute enactment of substantive liberal commitments.”

There is an obvious logical error here that Dan McLaughlin (AKA @BaseballCrank) points out:
“That’s . . . news? I have known that for 30 years. So has most everyone in the conservative world who has been following politics that long. And it’s older even than our lifetimes. Ahmari purports to discover, in 2020, what Edmund Burke knew in 1790. There are few hardier perennials than the observations that the activist Left is driven by anger against conventional American society and doesn’t care about the classical-liberal principles of the American founding, and that Democratic politicians and their pundit class have no fixed principles besides getting what they want. Ahmari goes on to say that it is merely empty ‘whining’ when ‘unwoke’ conservatives argue in favor of those principles and norms, and in favor of fairness and decency and telling the truth, instead of creating a mirror image of the Left that cares about nothing but substantive outcomes, that never asks any question but Lenin’s ‘Who does what to whom?’
“The core of the problem with this line of thinking from Ahmari and others is that it assumes the world is divided entirely into the activist Right and the activist Left. Of course, you can’t persuade the other side they are wrong to do the things they do. But you can persuade other people. That includes not only those in the center who will never be at home on the Right or Left, but also those who are less strongly tied to one side and are capable of changing sides.
“Shut up and enjoy your conquering enlightened overlords” is a take that does fairly encapsulate the Leftist ideology which is currently seeking to dominate. ‘Twould be “problematic” otherwise, as problematic as fictional Spartans trying not to be conquered.
Comedy pic.twitter.com/Ml6MqHDTHG
— Dataracer (@Dataracer117) August 13, 2020
Putting aside the fact that this is a highly stylized and fictionalized portrait of history that practically screams “artistic license”—the real Xerxes wasn’t an over 6’ tall Brazilian, for example—the take is a bad one. Of course foreigners are to be feared and attacked when they are literally invading your country with the explicit goal of conquest and subjugation. Of course the Spartans were wight and able-bodied, and the movie doesn’t whitewash the fact that physically disabled children were exposed to the elements. And yes, the Spartans were warriors by trade, but thy didn’t engage in aggression and violence for s**ts n’ giggles. Heck, in the movie, as in real life, they were the victims of aggression.

And while the franchise was limited, the Greek city states did enjoy literal democracy, and certainly not a political philosophy what wasn’t invented until millennia after the historical events took place. Yet all this is “problematic” because the movie has themes that don’t fit in with the woke narrative.

The concept of “smashing the duo-normative concept of marriage” is often dismissed as the fancies fringe eccentrics or bong-loving ex-Congresswomen who pose naked with goats. But when it, or any other mad idea, is embraced by an actual government body—it becomes a situation that requires our attention… and our action.
“A new domestic partnership policy in Somerville that recognizes polyamorous relationships is a powerful symbol, advocates and academics said, though the specifics of its protections remain limited.
“The move is thought to be the first of its kind in the nation, and another step forward in the push for civil rights for those living outside heterosexual marriages.
“‘The Somerville ordinance is an exciting turning point for people who are polyamorous or in multipartner families,’ said Diana Adams, the executive director of the Chosen Family Law Center in New York. ‘There has been tremendous momentum and energy and hope for this for many years.’”
“Adams said the law center hoped to push similar ordinances in other small, progressive cities, in a strategy similar to the one that secured the legalization of same-sex marriage across the country. Polyamory refers to people in consenting relationships with multiple partners.”
As the saying goes, “history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes”, especially when using the same hellish Marxism that always results in totalitarian repression.
If you're one of those people who gets off on the whole "history repeats" bromide, here's a little comparison of the Cultural Revolution with today's mobs. pic.twitter.com/JBe4QtVgcf
— Dave Vandenbout (@devbisme) August 26, 2020
The Critical Race Theory “Struggle Sessions” are being challenged from within by a brave soul who has likely thrown his entire career out the window with a “canceling” on its way.
There is a civil war erupting at @SandiaLabs.
Following my investigation, a dissident electrical engineer named Casey Peterson emailed all 16,000 employees denouncing critical race theory in the lab and hoping to spark a rebellion against Sandia executives.
Here's the story.🧵
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) August 27, 2020
On Tuesday, Peterson made a YouTube video "pushing back back on the narrative of modern systemic racism and white privilege."
The video quickly hit 10,000 views within the labs and dozens of Sandia employees contacted Peterson to express support.https://t.co/vMDH2vILB7
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) August 27, 2020
Of course intellectual diversity at one of the top scientific labs in the world wouldn’t be tolerated.
News of the Week for Aug. 29th, 2020
There are people with bonafide medical conditions such as Swyer’s Syndrome where the body develops along the lines of the opposite sex than the presence (or lack thereof) would otherwise have directed bodily development.
There are people who insist that “gender identity” is separate and distinct from biological sex, thus a biological male who identifies as a woman is “trans-gender” because said individuals gender identity is the opposite of that associated with their sex.
There are people who believe that “sex” is a spectrum, and that the presence or lack of a Y chromosome is irrelevant to whether one is a man or a woman.
Sadly, there are even people who believe that by becoming transgender, that biology will follow suite and that by means of modern day sympathetic magic will take on the appellation and superficial appearance of the other sex they will become the other sex. It is this last category which is truly sad because a sudden realization of reality can cause a mental break or even potentially suicide. In some cases, the delusion is so strong that biological reality is outright denies as being “transphobic”:

The “Struggle Sessions” of wokeness that we’ve seen forced upon city workers in Seattle and in Sandia National Lab are far more widespread than many would want to believe. Yet again, Christopher F. Rufo has uncovered more “anti-racism”, this time at Argonne National Lab.
The virus of critical race theory is spreading to all of the national laboratories.
In new documents from Argonne National Lab—which handles national security and supercomputing for the federal government—a whistleblower describes a relentless campaign of racial harassment.
🧵
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) August 20, 2020
One must wonder if the white deer that roam the grounds of Argonne will be forced to “check their privilege”?

#BlackLivesMatter is openly Marxist, but they are primarily channeling Lenin. The broader Left’s goal is to fundamentally transform America into something antithetical to itself. They don’t care exactly how it is done, so they probe everywhere until they find a soft spot, as Cameron Hilditch notes.
“[This] put[s] me in mind of an old quotation from Lenin that he used to describe the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary strategy.
“‘You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.’
“This has been the tactic of every revolutionary movement in modern history. Armed with the sharp end of their weapons (both physical and philosophical), they search for the soft underbelly of the existing order, the place at once most vulnerable and least likely to offer concerted resistance. When this point is discovered, Lenin instructs his followers to attack it with all their might.
“…
“The most reliable indicator for the success of any revolution is whether or not one can hear this question being asked among those in power: ‘Are we sure we’re on the right side of this?’ Once these words begin to make their way around the corridors of power, the writing is on the wall for the powers that be.
“…
“Black Lives Matter, it seems, have probed and found mush in the area of race relations. This is hardly surprising. If there is one issue on which Americans are likely to doubt the justice of their nation’s cause, it is the issue of race. It is hard for a country only 60-odd years removed from the civil-rights movement to have great confidence in the established order when that order is criticized for racial injustice. But the fact that this doubt manifests itself in a reluctance to stand four-square behind the rule of law is what cynical criminals such as those mentioned above prey upon. They firmly believe that this reluctance will allow them to get away with beating the living daylights out of a human being in the middle of an American city and then rummaging through his car to steal things . . . on camera.”
But why? Because we’ve lost the narrative. For far too many people they just took America and for what it stands stands for granted and thought that it was self-evidence because for them it was normal and presumed it always would be to others. Slavery was always anti-thetical to the underlying precepts and values that pre-date America and once endemic through-out the Anglosphere. It was a cancer that corrupted and poisoned America, but a cancer and poison that America ultimately triumphed over, though deep wounds remain. One of those wounds is racism, which arose as an attempt to justify slavery in a culture within which equality under the law and liberty was integral by claiming that the enslaved race was inferior. This, too, was antithetical to what America stands for, and something America is rejecting, despite the Critical Race Theorists attempt to have people see everything through the framework of race and the oppressor/oppressed dynamic.
But we’ve not been teaching this. And from this absence the alternative narrative of America being systemically racist that was build with the purpose of racial oppression (and other intersectional “systems of oppression”). We are now paying that price.