Listen to a reading of this article: It's an interesting time for culture war red herrings in the shadow of the empire. There are no major electoral races currently underway. Government Covid regulations have been mostly rolled back. The empire is waging an extremely dangerous and
Agreed that the war against Ukraine is the most important problem, because the illegal sock puppet Biden wants to send patriot missiles and AMERICAN TROOPS to Ukraine to man them. This is a direct escalation. The next steps are: 1) America hitting Russia, 2) Russia retaliating, and 3) nuclear war killing billions of people.
Also agreed that identity politics and anti-wokeness serve as a distraction.
Disagree that wokeness and cultural marxism are not real threats. I think they are second-tier threats, far far far far far after WWIII. But if you'd like to read a good book as to how wokism has contaminated society, here is one:
Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam Hardcover – August 17, 2021
I realize Caitlin is very far left, although I don't think she has ever really defined how that would work. I believe in free markets. I don't think we have them at all. I think we have fake everything:
Fake food (with chemicals)
Fake drugs (Pfizer)
Fake money (fiat currency)
Fake media (propaganda)
Fake elections
and fake pundits creating these distractions.
But when they are cutting off boys balls and chopping off girls breasts so some Satanic corporation can make about $7 million per victim, and mess up people psychologically for life, you can't say wokeness is undefinable and cultural marxism isn't a thing. That's called denial, and they treat that in Alcoholics Anonymous.
I'm still with all of the people here who think the number one problem in the world is the potential for nuclear war, which I am doing my best to help us avoid by talking with those I know, and writing my fake senators and fake representatives. You can say I am doing very little, but I am also open to your practical suggestions.
Eating your landlord?? Good luck with that! .The rental housing market is being taken over by corporations in case you haven't noticed. You won't be able to get close enough to"eat" your landlord. You'll soon be crying for that good ole mom 'n pop landlord that you used to love to hate.
We live in a society in which -- from early childhood -- we everywhere perceive an endless perpetuation of Hollywood-quality fables about war and manhood, success and the acquisition of stuff, romantic love forever, and other equally horrendous bullshit. Where much of the populace still believes that society to be a meritocracy, while the grim reality is actually that of a celebritized mediocracy. What can one expect but delusion?
No, no, a thousand times no. In the anti Vietnam war movement, there were those who argued that struggles for civil rights, women’s rights and democratic rights more broadly were a distraction. Some argued that only efforts and actions directly opposing the war were worth while. That way of thinking was wrong then and it’s wrong now. Yes, fighting imperial propaganda and organizing against US imperial wars are of paramount importance. But…
Awareness, consciousness and willingness to fight are heightened in different people in different ways. Awareness for many is raised first by diving into the struggles that most touch them personally. More often than not, joining one fight on the side of the working class leads to willingness - even eagerness - to join other, bigger fights.
And a key point is this: gender ideology is manifestly a reactionary attack on women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, children’s health, rational thought, free speech and civil liberties - all issues of critical importance to the working class. Fighting to defend and extend these rights feeds directly into building working class solidarity and into the ability to mobilize against imperial war-making.
Women are told to accept men in their private spaces, rape shelters, prisons, sports teams and affirmative action programs if said men believe (or pretend to believe) they are women. Gays and lesbians are accused of bigotry if they prefer same sex partners rather than same “gender” partners (i.e., choosing partners based on their objective biology (sex) rather than their subjective self-perception (gender).) Children who reject sexist stereotypes are told they must be “trans” and are steered toward a lifetime of dependence on big pharma. Those speaking about these truths are censored and deplatformed. Every element of this benefits the powers that be while dividing and disorienting the working class.
Convincing people that men are actually women (and vice versa) is a handy step toward the kind of logical disorientation and abandonment of critical thinking necessary to getting people to accept that war is peace, free speech is harmful, “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country”, and many other dangerous, irrational precepts of capitalist ideology.
So why do some whose overall outlook is conservative oppose gender ideology? For the less powerful, this is nothing more than the normal contradictions one finds in individuals: conservative on some issues and progressive on others. Many of the more powerful only oppose gender ideology opportunistically, because the left has vacated the entire lane to them. If the left spoke up with a principled, unified voice, the right would not be able to use anti-wokeness as a trojan horse for their other issues and the oppression that gender ideology enables would be snatched from the arsenal of the ruling class. Misunderstanding this is a really, really big self own. For more see https://brucelesnick.substack.com/p/with-gender-ideology-the-left-is
1) I fight existential threats AND Gender Identity Ideology. I do both. It's not an either/or thing. In fact, it's a must-do-both-thing. (See 3 below on that.)
2)The damage from Gender Identity Ideology being forced on us all... is real and huge, and people won't ignore it, no matter how much you admonish us to do so. You think it's minor because you're not seeing most of it. Erasure has already happened, as all of us who are depublished, deplatformed, fired, assaulted at speaker's corners, and more can attest, but you don't see us. You join the travesty of pretending we don't exist and/or that we've got our knickers in a twist over nothing important... You need to open your eyes; read/hear what we say! When girls are having their healthy breasts amputated & kids are going on blockers and hormones that stymie brain/bone/organ maturation, parents and other caring people are simply not going to ignore that. (The #s are huge; those who claim otherwise in comments are wrong.) When women in prisons in the US share their cells with men-in-woman-face, people are not going to say, "Oh well, not important." Or "Oh well, I feel sorry for the women who've been raped already (numerous) and those yet to endure that fate, but I'm going to ignore it." (1000s of men want into women's prisons in U.S.) If you're child is taught absolute anti-science drivel at school that guts their ability to think critically and denies them a basic grasp of biology and even reality, you're not going to ignore it. See my new article on this: https://caroldansereau.substack.com/p/the-anti-science-disaster-of-gender Bottom line, pontificate as much as you want Caitlin about what people should ignore; it ain't gonna happen.
3) There is a huge opportunity here to build a movement to demand system change. The people I now organize with, as the result of my decision to stand against the woke madness of Gender Ideology are working class, courageous, and concerned about all sorts of issues not just Gender. Many are indeed confused; they see socialism as the root of the Gender Cult, etc. But there's a reason for that. Most socialist organizations and many other groups on the Left are letting the Gender Madness spread, and even applauding it. The problem is not that some people are anti-woke; it's that so many are not, yourself included Caitlin. You are handing fascistic forces the future on a platter, because THEY talk sense on Gender Identity. And you ignore the reality of what's happening in its name.
You are wrong on this one, Caitlin. And it matters very much
Interesting that a lot of the movements referred to in this article really took off after the 2008 Banking Crisis and a short period of protests against international banks and their structures. I wonder why.
I don't fully agree with your piece. You only talk about how right-wing people are anti-woke. One can oppose wokeness via other lenses, like a Marxist one. Take the leftist essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, about how leftist movements need to oppose wokeness as it is harmful to a socialist vision of class solidarity. Nothing right-wing about that.
So many disparate factions in America are against wokeness, all for different reasons: right wingers as you say, dirtbag-leftist/class-first leftists, libertarians, racial nationalists, religious fundamentalists, scientists that feel like they can no longer do science, rationalists, radfems, and so much more.
Systemic injustice exists, but pretending thst pronouns will make everything right is silly to the point of dishonest.
To give but one example- if large corporations would stop trying to prevent their employees from unionizing, the result would be a transfer of concrete material benefits to brown, and black, and yellow, and white working class people greater than all the diversity committees ever formed, all thebunisex bathrooms, and greater than all the tweets ever tweeted.
Which is precisely why they won't do it. Instead, we denounce Melvin as "literal Hitler" for asserting that there are only 26 genders, plus genders not yet discovered.
Thank you for the excellent take down of the liberal-conservative alliance!
As I was considering the analysis, I wished there were a couple of forward looking statements about how those of us, who advocate for an openminded and radical egalitarian world, might envision a multidimensional perspective combining class, race, and gender together. My hunch is that if we scraped the Internet to see how many texts proactively managed to address the multidimensionality of exploitation (understood in the neo-Marxist sense as the extraction of surplus value by owners from wage labor), oppression (understood in the neo-Marxist sense of dehumanization in regard to other social relations), alienation, and commodification, we would get a very low score. If this is actually the case, what does it tell us about how socialization works? People are either disinclined to envision a multidimensional perspective or they are shaped to disaggregate the roles society asks them to play, or a combination of both including other modes of conformity. This is basically the fallacy of composition, attributing the cause of something to a part rather than the whole. While I am skeptical of systems theory, there are some intriguing approaches, such as paradox theory, that allow for multidimensionality to not always be entirely congruent.
But in my view, you are right on in calling out the ways in which identity politics have ended up as a channel for certain groups to bypass other groups. When we hear the mantra about inclusion, diversity, and equity, inclusion for some seems to take a back seat. When inclusion is left out, diversity and equity become exclusive to the in-group. In other words, those of us who are dehumanized, oppressed, and exploited are not fully free until all of us are free. That's why in my opinion MLK ended up gravitating toward anti-capitalism and democratic socialism.
I am primarily an environmentalist, as well as antiwar. I get fed up with conferences where everyone must name their pronouns, and with strategy sessions where all we can talk about is identity stuff, mostly buzzwords. On the other hand, It used to be the case that every protest or gathering was 99% white (I do live in a very white region) and I noticed that well-paid top positions in many organization were filled by males, while the people doing the day to day work were about 75% female. I've seen notable improvement in both those things, and we DO need to grow into a diverse, massive united movement to make change. We just can't afford to spend all out time talking about this when the world's on fire.
I think it's very true that this aspect of the culture wars, as well as others, is deliberately and carefully crafted by agents of the ruling class to distract us from the real war.
Great piece. HOWEVER, what gender ideology is doing to kids and women is material harm. Will you not speak on this? And DEI is being used to submerge class and class interests. It should be openly opposed for this. So ignoring “woke” seems fine when it is a vague complaint. In specific reality, it is hurting us.
You make some great points her, Caitlin. I've been guilty as anyone of feeding this beast. I belong to that second category of anti-wokesters you mentioned - I'm a Leftist who sees the Ruling Class stirring up a Culture War so they don't have to fight a Class War, and whenever I call it out my MSNBC Democrat friends accuse me of being an Alt Right Yahtzee.
I'm a comic book writer and right now American comics are being written for the Woke by the Woke... which is why nobody reads them (including the Woke) and Japanese comics outsell Marvel and DC 10 to 1. I've seen a medium I love passionately taken over by activists, so I have a personal stake in this squabble, but we should all take care not to add to the problem.
Nancy Fraser, Professor at the New School, explained exactly what's going on politically and culturally and named it "progressive Neoliberalism" - check out here analysis:(the first paper plays with the title of Ted Lowi's classic book)
It's a good thing that racism ended with the election of Obama and the removing of statues. And that's the problem with the current iteration of "woke": it focuses on cultural aesthetics while ignoring political rot, thereby serving, as others have noted, as a distraction, which, while orchestrated by puppet-masters in Washington and Silicon Valley, is an unwitting distraction among the populace, which is what makes it so insidious. The so-called 'woke' are eager to lick the jackboot of authoritarianism because it's stamped with their preferred personal pronouns, which clearly illustrates that to be 'woke' doesn't mean you're woke about everything -- in their case, not 'woke' to their own manipulation by opportunists. And people getting branded as 'bigots' and other irrelevant pejoratives for pointing this out further substantiates that the woke/anti-woke culture-war is just theater. Saying this doesn't mean I don't support the causes that 'woke' ostensibly stands for, because I do. It's just that my version of civil rights and human dignity includes everyone, not just those wearing rainbow hair and screaming at the top of their lungs. But like they say, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.
If vacuous born-rich twerps wish to casually appropriate a dismissive buzz-phrase twisted by their inbred Afrikaans trauma; I'd suggest, "can't even be BOTHERED," "Oowee," "open a can of whoop-ass," “It’s so quiet in here you can hear a mouse piss on cotton.” "NOPE!" "Going to HELL in a hand basket," "It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to!"
Agreed that the war against Ukraine is the most important problem, because the illegal sock puppet Biden wants to send patriot missiles and AMERICAN TROOPS to Ukraine to man them. This is a direct escalation. The next steps are: 1) America hitting Russia, 2) Russia retaliating, and 3) nuclear war killing billions of people.
Also agreed that identity politics and anti-wokeness serve as a distraction.
Disagree that wokeness and cultural marxism are not real threats. I think they are second-tier threats, far far far far far after WWIII. But if you'd like to read a good book as to how wokism has contaminated society, here is one:
Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam Hardcover – August 17, 2021
by Vivek Ramaswamy (https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Inc-Corporate-Americas-Justice/dp/1546090789/ref=sr_1_1?crid=PXCVIKDATT0A&keywords=woke%2C+inc&qid=1671280461&sprefix=woke%2C+inc%2Caps%2C284&sr=8-1)
I realize Caitlin is very far left, although I don't think she has ever really defined how that would work. I believe in free markets. I don't think we have them at all. I think we have fake everything:
Fake food (with chemicals)
Fake drugs (Pfizer)
Fake money (fiat currency)
Fake media (propaganda)
Fake elections
and fake pundits creating these distractions.
But when they are cutting off boys balls and chopping off girls breasts so some Satanic corporation can make about $7 million per victim, and mess up people psychologically for life, you can't say wokeness is undefinable and cultural marxism isn't a thing. That's called denial, and they treat that in Alcoholics Anonymous.
I'm still with all of the people here who think the number one problem in the world is the potential for nuclear war, which I am doing my best to help us avoid by talking with those I know, and writing my fake senators and fake representatives. You can say I am doing very little, but I am also open to your practical suggestions.
God bless you.
What can be said, but Amen? The bumper sticker politics of my own neighborhood is chilling in this regard--from both sides.
Eating your landlord?? Good luck with that! .The rental housing market is being taken over by corporations in case you haven't noticed. You won't be able to get close enough to"eat" your landlord. You'll soon be crying for that good ole mom 'n pop landlord that you used to love to hate.
We live in a society in which -- from early childhood -- we everywhere perceive an endless perpetuation of Hollywood-quality fables about war and manhood, success and the acquisition of stuff, romantic love forever, and other equally horrendous bullshit. Where much of the populace still believes that society to be a meritocracy, while the grim reality is actually that of a celebritized mediocracy. What can one expect but delusion?
No, no, a thousand times no. In the anti Vietnam war movement, there were those who argued that struggles for civil rights, women’s rights and democratic rights more broadly were a distraction. Some argued that only efforts and actions directly opposing the war were worth while. That way of thinking was wrong then and it’s wrong now. Yes, fighting imperial propaganda and organizing against US imperial wars are of paramount importance. But…
Awareness, consciousness and willingness to fight are heightened in different people in different ways. Awareness for many is raised first by diving into the struggles that most touch them personally. More often than not, joining one fight on the side of the working class leads to willingness - even eagerness - to join other, bigger fights.
And a key point is this: gender ideology is manifestly a reactionary attack on women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, children’s health, rational thought, free speech and civil liberties - all issues of critical importance to the working class. Fighting to defend and extend these rights feeds directly into building working class solidarity and into the ability to mobilize against imperial war-making.
Women are told to accept men in their private spaces, rape shelters, prisons, sports teams and affirmative action programs if said men believe (or pretend to believe) they are women. Gays and lesbians are accused of bigotry if they prefer same sex partners rather than same “gender” partners (i.e., choosing partners based on their objective biology (sex) rather than their subjective self-perception (gender).) Children who reject sexist stereotypes are told they must be “trans” and are steered toward a lifetime of dependence on big pharma. Those speaking about these truths are censored and deplatformed. Every element of this benefits the powers that be while dividing and disorienting the working class.
Convincing people that men are actually women (and vice versa) is a handy step toward the kind of logical disorientation and abandonment of critical thinking necessary to getting people to accept that war is peace, free speech is harmful, “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country”, and many other dangerous, irrational precepts of capitalist ideology.
So why do some whose overall outlook is conservative oppose gender ideology? For the less powerful, this is nothing more than the normal contradictions one finds in individuals: conservative on some issues and progressive on others. Many of the more powerful only oppose gender ideology opportunistically, because the left has vacated the entire lane to them. If the left spoke up with a principled, unified voice, the right would not be able to use anti-wokeness as a trojan horse for their other issues and the oppression that gender ideology enables would be snatched from the arsenal of the ruling class. Misunderstanding this is a really, really big self own. For more see https://brucelesnick.substack.com/p/with-gender-ideology-the-left-is
You are missing so much, Caitlin!
1) I fight existential threats AND Gender Identity Ideology. I do both. It's not an either/or thing. In fact, it's a must-do-both-thing. (See 3 below on that.)
2)The damage from Gender Identity Ideology being forced on us all... is real and huge, and people won't ignore it, no matter how much you admonish us to do so. You think it's minor because you're not seeing most of it. Erasure has already happened, as all of us who are depublished, deplatformed, fired, assaulted at speaker's corners, and more can attest, but you don't see us. You join the travesty of pretending we don't exist and/or that we've got our knickers in a twist over nothing important... You need to open your eyes; read/hear what we say! When girls are having their healthy breasts amputated & kids are going on blockers and hormones that stymie brain/bone/organ maturation, parents and other caring people are simply not going to ignore that. (The #s are huge; those who claim otherwise in comments are wrong.) When women in prisons in the US share their cells with men-in-woman-face, people are not going to say, "Oh well, not important." Or "Oh well, I feel sorry for the women who've been raped already (numerous) and those yet to endure that fate, but I'm going to ignore it." (1000s of men want into women's prisons in U.S.) If you're child is taught absolute anti-science drivel at school that guts their ability to think critically and denies them a basic grasp of biology and even reality, you're not going to ignore it. See my new article on this: https://caroldansereau.substack.com/p/the-anti-science-disaster-of-gender Bottom line, pontificate as much as you want Caitlin about what people should ignore; it ain't gonna happen.
3) There is a huge opportunity here to build a movement to demand system change. The people I now organize with, as the result of my decision to stand against the woke madness of Gender Ideology are working class, courageous, and concerned about all sorts of issues not just Gender. Many are indeed confused; they see socialism as the root of the Gender Cult, etc. But there's a reason for that. Most socialist organizations and many other groups on the Left are letting the Gender Madness spread, and even applauding it. The problem is not that some people are anti-woke; it's that so many are not, yourself included Caitlin. You are handing fascistic forces the future on a platter, because THEY talk sense on Gender Identity. And you ignore the reality of what's happening in its name.
You are wrong on this one, Caitlin. And it matters very much
Interesting that a lot of the movements referred to in this article really took off after the 2008 Banking Crisis and a short period of protests against international banks and their structures. I wonder why.
I don't fully agree with your piece. You only talk about how right-wing people are anti-woke. One can oppose wokeness via other lenses, like a Marxist one. Take the leftist essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, about how leftist movements need to oppose wokeness as it is harmful to a socialist vision of class solidarity. Nothing right-wing about that.
So many disparate factions in America are against wokeness, all for different reasons: right wingers as you say, dirtbag-leftist/class-first leftists, libertarians, racial nationalists, religious fundamentalists, scientists that feel like they can no longer do science, rationalists, radfems, and so much more.
Systemic injustice exists, but pretending thst pronouns will make everything right is silly to the point of dishonest.
To give but one example- if large corporations would stop trying to prevent their employees from unionizing, the result would be a transfer of concrete material benefits to brown, and black, and yellow, and white working class people greater than all the diversity committees ever formed, all thebunisex bathrooms, and greater than all the tweets ever tweeted.
Which is precisely why they won't do it. Instead, we denounce Melvin as "literal Hitler" for asserting that there are only 26 genders, plus genders not yet discovered.
Thank you for the excellent take down of the liberal-conservative alliance!
As I was considering the analysis, I wished there were a couple of forward looking statements about how those of us, who advocate for an openminded and radical egalitarian world, might envision a multidimensional perspective combining class, race, and gender together. My hunch is that if we scraped the Internet to see how many texts proactively managed to address the multidimensionality of exploitation (understood in the neo-Marxist sense as the extraction of surplus value by owners from wage labor), oppression (understood in the neo-Marxist sense of dehumanization in regard to other social relations), alienation, and commodification, we would get a very low score. If this is actually the case, what does it tell us about how socialization works? People are either disinclined to envision a multidimensional perspective or they are shaped to disaggregate the roles society asks them to play, or a combination of both including other modes of conformity. This is basically the fallacy of composition, attributing the cause of something to a part rather than the whole. While I am skeptical of systems theory, there are some intriguing approaches, such as paradox theory, that allow for multidimensionality to not always be entirely congruent.
But in my view, you are right on in calling out the ways in which identity politics have ended up as a channel for certain groups to bypass other groups. When we hear the mantra about inclusion, diversity, and equity, inclusion for some seems to take a back seat. When inclusion is left out, diversity and equity become exclusive to the in-group. In other words, those of us who are dehumanized, oppressed, and exploited are not fully free until all of us are free. That's why in my opinion MLK ended up gravitating toward anti-capitalism and democratic socialism.
I am primarily an environmentalist, as well as antiwar. I get fed up with conferences where everyone must name their pronouns, and with strategy sessions where all we can talk about is identity stuff, mostly buzzwords. On the other hand, It used to be the case that every protest or gathering was 99% white (I do live in a very white region) and I noticed that well-paid top positions in many organization were filled by males, while the people doing the day to day work were about 75% female. I've seen notable improvement in both those things, and we DO need to grow into a diverse, massive united movement to make change. We just can't afford to spend all out time talking about this when the world's on fire.
I think it's very true that this aspect of the culture wars, as well as others, is deliberately and carefully crafted by agents of the ruling class to distract us from the real war.
Great piece. HOWEVER, what gender ideology is doing to kids and women is material harm. Will you not speak on this? And DEI is being used to submerge class and class interests. It should be openly opposed for this. So ignoring “woke” seems fine when it is a vague complaint. In specific reality, it is hurting us.
You make some great points her, Caitlin. I've been guilty as anyone of feeding this beast. I belong to that second category of anti-wokesters you mentioned - I'm a Leftist who sees the Ruling Class stirring up a Culture War so they don't have to fight a Class War, and whenever I call it out my MSNBC Democrat friends accuse me of being an Alt Right Yahtzee.
I'm a comic book writer and right now American comics are being written for the Woke by the Woke... which is why nobody reads them (including the Woke) and Japanese comics outsell Marvel and DC 10 to 1. I've seen a medium I love passionately taken over by activists, so I have a personal stake in this squabble, but we should all take care not to add to the problem.
Nancy Fraser, Professor at the New School, explained exactly what's going on politically and culturally and named it "progressive Neoliberalism" - check out here analysis:(the first paper plays with the title of Ted Lowi's classic book)
The End Of Progressive Neoliberalism
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser
From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/
It's a good thing that racism ended with the election of Obama and the removing of statues. And that's the problem with the current iteration of "woke": it focuses on cultural aesthetics while ignoring political rot, thereby serving, as others have noted, as a distraction, which, while orchestrated by puppet-masters in Washington and Silicon Valley, is an unwitting distraction among the populace, which is what makes it so insidious. The so-called 'woke' are eager to lick the jackboot of authoritarianism because it's stamped with their preferred personal pronouns, which clearly illustrates that to be 'woke' doesn't mean you're woke about everything -- in their case, not 'woke' to their own manipulation by opportunists. And people getting branded as 'bigots' and other irrelevant pejoratives for pointing this out further substantiates that the woke/anti-woke culture-war is just theater. Saying this doesn't mean I don't support the causes that 'woke' ostensibly stands for, because I do. It's just that my version of civil rights and human dignity includes everyone, not just those wearing rainbow hair and screaming at the top of their lungs. But like they say, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.
If vacuous born-rich twerps wish to casually appropriate a dismissive buzz-phrase twisted by their inbred Afrikaans trauma; I'd suggest, "can't even be BOTHERED," "Oowee," "open a can of whoop-ass," “It’s so quiet in here you can hear a mouse piss on cotton.” "NOPE!" "Going to HELL in a hand basket," "It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to!"