Great piece again Brad. You routinely hit on the most important topics we should all be discussing. Not that Lauren Boebert misbehaved in a theater.
Elon Musk started what I thought was the beginning of the end of the woke rot when he exited all the toxic woke employees of Twitter. Other firms have been following his lead. In my businesses, I require all hiring managers to use a list of questions that identify the level of woke rot in the candidates. They will not be hired if they have it. I also discriminate against certain schools and degree programs knowing they are highly infected with the woke rot.
Now, I am good with people having diverse views. The problem with having the woke rot is that at some level those beliefs are counter to what makes a good employees. For example, prioritizing identity grievance over actual productive results. Believing that there is no objective truth and every decision is just relative to power. Unfortunately those in deep with these views are toxic to the workplace and must be prevented from entering.
I have been considering that this cannot last in private industry because private business fails unless it operates as a functional meritocracy. The quality of products and services will decline with the decline in workforce capability. Owners thinking that they are virtue signaling to prevent activist attacks that hurt their sales will start to realize that a growing reputation for lower quality is a bigger business threat. I think that realization is there and many owners are quietly purging.
However, I do think that we need new legislation. I think we call it Civil Rights 3.0. For it we need to expand the requirements that all public and private institutions get significant sanctions for any actions that harm American constitutional rights. Specifically, no organization of size should be allowed to discriminate based on political orientation or any historical record of speech... as it conflicts with 1A rights. I think it is fine to assess and test ideas and values to accept or reject candidates... but fairly for each person. Selection based on racial, gender or other identity attributes is already in violation of civil rights laws, we just need to strengthen them and include penalties. Big tech needs to lose Section 230 protections if they are not acting superficially as platforms and are censoring content (in effect controlling content like a publisher). Again, 1A protections need to be hammered in and enforced.
I think the woke thing will die itself because the logical and rational eventually win all the arguments. However, we might need help by government intervention to expedite the death of woke as it is doing great damage to the republic today.
“I have been considering that this cannot last in private industry because private business fails unless it operates as a functional meritocracy.”
Something that rarely gets considered is that our system of intellectual property rights effectively grants monopoly status to these huge oligarchical companies such, for example, Google or Microsoft. They own a vast multitude of patents and an army of lawyers to enforce them. Consequently there cannot be the kind of competition that defines a free market economy.
That’s also why you have no alternative but to agree to their non-negotiable shrink wrap contracts. I recently encountered another bizarre form of these kinds of contracts of adhesion. Square, the company that operates many of these point of sale terminals (the ones that also demand you tip staff for self-serve restaurant counter service), sent me an email that I agreed to their revised terms of service. Odd because I don’t do any direct business with Square. Turns out that I have unknowingly provided my email address to companies using square terminals for the sole purpose of having the receipts emailed (handy if you are buying durable goods and want proof of purchase for warranty purposes). I think Home Depot was the culprit. Apparently Square thinks that provides them with sufficient grounds to unilaterally enforce their contract provisions on me.
Good point. This is part of the credentialing block. Bigs gravitate toward advantage. If government and other institutions protect them from the stress of upstart competition, they will happily endorse it.
Interesting that Musk makes most of his inventions public domain.
Interestingly, it looks like single women are singlehandedly saving the Democratic Party. White liberals are also the primary drivers of wokeness. I think it's reasonable to assume single woke white women are a huge problem.
They will drive themselves into extinction hopefully, while continually poisoning the kids along the way. demographics may be destiny but it takes a while to manifest
I'm not hijacking, but I'm re-reading Christopher Lasch's amazingly prescient 1995 book “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy" and he says this:
"The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or 'alternative' institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all."
Lasch was a prophet and we are living through what he predicted, except instead of creating alternative institutions, the globalist progressive oligarchy (aka Social Justice Inc) have just embarked upon a full ideological takeover of our institutions (and society), using SJ dogma as litmus test, social shibboleth, loyalty oath and requirement for employment.
And as far as Michael Lind (who I enjoy): his proposal reminded me of a zombie movie when a character gets added midway: You know they're just gonna get eaten too!
By the end of the last century thinkers like Lasch, Rieff, Paglia, Allan Bloom etc could see this coming, but there was no stopping the elite decoupling from America and its transformation into a weird cross bw Ancien Regime nobility and the Jacobins who dethroned them.
Back then was the time to fight, when the enemy was amassed at our borders, not after they've captured and colonized every inch of territory. But American liberals failed to save liberalism because they couldn't withstand the Left's superweapon, the Bigotry Accusation, and conservatives failed because they devoted 2 generations of energy to making money and starting wars.
The only way forward for culture is SAMIZDAT—creating and performing outside official channels, sort of like the underground in pre-60s America—and the only way forward for anyone else is to flee to the Red States, where the SJocracy is less firmly entrenched.
They are taking over existing institutions because they lack the stuff required to build their own from the ground up.
It is a bit like the UAW members striking. They want more from the business that they have no clue how, and no interest in working so hard, to start, run and own themselves.
Hard times create strong men that create good times that create weak men that create hard times. We are living in a time of weak men... that ironically are largely biological women.
hey, the mafia weren't necessarily able to start their own trucking cos or labor unions, but they they still got control of them...and yes these are weak times, back in the day you shed blood to gain control, now you shed tears...
True, but the mafia was primarily interested in money, and thus they also understood very well the meritocracy of production. The wokesters don't care about money as much as they care about status, belonging and power attained though their cult practices. So the woke rot is detrimental to business as the primary goal of business, like the mafia, is to make money.
You are so right about the tears vs direct competition. However, they are just as nasty as the mafia but in a passive aggressive way. I call them crybullies.
It’s baffling watching these “libs of tictoc “ types (as was stated; mostly white, single women) ranting on about the most ridiculous things, none of which make any sense...until you realize that these (mostly) women have no real meaning in their lives, and being a social justice warriors gives them a sense of purpose; they hold on to these causes with such fervour because without them, they are nothing.
And for the love of all that is still good, we need to stop calling these zealots "progressive", as they are anything but. They are no more "progressive" than lemmings "progressing" off of a cliff.
There was certainly some racism when I grew up in the 70's. But by the time I left college it had nearly been vanquished.
Nobody was even "thinking" about racism until he stoked it again for his own expediency.
I don't pin it all on him...but he used it to get the bully pulpit, to keep it and enrich himself at the expense of the very people he claimed to defend.
You do such an excellent job of connecting the dots regarding the cancer of Wokeism that has infiltrated this country and the world. I just long to find a reason to believe that it didn't all make so much sense.
I think one big limiting factor of this cultural Marxism is that Marxism usually isn't sustainable because it doesn't produce positive results and will fail in the face of free market competition. I think it would be a good idea to focus on creating alternative institutions that are apolitical - or even take back the institutions that have been subverted.
There is a certain kind of apathy that lead to this in the first place, people who just want to do their jobs and not engage in politics at all. So you got colleges where the power slowly moved from the faculty to the administrators with the false promise that faculty could then focus on science and teaching instead of bureaucracy. Instead they now have to deal with two bureaucracies, the internal one in the administration and the external in the government. When 50 students sign a letter to block a hire and the rest of the students don't engage then this tiny minority gets their way. A big part of the problem of course is for the majority to recognize they're the majority - I think there needs to be a way to break through the culture of fear that pervades a lot of institutions. It took a very long time for example for people in e.g. Poland or East Germany to recognize that the communists weren't that powerful after all.
"I think one big limiting factor of this cultural Marxism is that Marxism usually isn't sustainable because it doesn't produce positive results and will fail in the face of free market competition."
Exactly. Free trade works, because it incentivises real-world thinking. In a free society, the woke fail, because they cannot harness the productive to their ends, which leaves them impotent. Atlas shrugs.
It takes my breath away to hear we have *too much* freedom! Lind is looking in the wrong direction. We need to identify all the ways government control has *caused* this situation, and step-by-step undo them. For example, get government *out* of education.
As to the claim government can be the solution, the Twitter Files, I think, should have put that idea to rest.
It's precisely because government gets their fingers in everything that everything is becoming politicized. People who think all we need is to drain the swamp and make the government institutions somehow better are deluding themselves. At least with the free market and private sector we have the opportunity to create alternatives.
You are saying the answer is to give the govt more power? Even though they appear to be bribing corporations to tow the line? Give more power to elected officials, when trust in fair elections is at an all-time low? I don’t know the answer, but I cannot agree. I think the answer is in more parallel systems and offering alternatives to people who don’t want to play along
Right?! To the contrary- the government is quite content to watch society self destruct...the Canadian government, in Klaus’ words, has been infiltrated by the WEF and they have been hell bent on polarizing every aspect of society.
Same. I think the new right is at least acknowledging that, a la rufo, you need to use government that exists rather than cede it to your opponents because the ratchet only goes one way. There is no frontier away from the bureaucrats until we get to Mars at best so what else is there to do
Use it to eradicate the rot, but then if you have ratcheted it up another notch, how do you stop it from being used against you again? Not sure if I trust that it could be used in this way but then scaled back down.
DEI hiring and college admissions could be seen as a way to shelve hordes of useless parasites who, if put to real work, would only cause problems and system failures. Keep them away from people who are useful or learning to be useful.
Let the DEIs rot in their blighted urban hellholes, imagining that their lives and beings are superior somehow. Good riddance.
WoQuaeda = one of the best descriptions of them I've ever seen!! Excellent essay as always!
Since when do you see and decide everything through the lens of murdering babies?? Since when do you let men take over women's sports? It's all so weird; when I was a young woman, girls didn't get abortions; they went to stay at either an out of town relative's home or at a "home" for pregnant girls. Now Title IX and women's sports are badly damaged or destroyed.
There is what I call 'the pregnant teenager school'. They aren't taught to take care of their babies AND continue their education. They are only taught how to take care of the babies and get on any and all public assistance possible. I talked to the ONE GIRL who planned to return to school and/or get her GED while she raised her baby. One out of 200!!
On my last day, I answered the phone and took a message from a woman calling said she wanted to enroll her ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD daughter at the school. She then said she had gone to that school too. Another pregnant girl came in to register with her daughter holding her hand. She couldn't have been more than 16. Those girls weren't getting an education at all. Of course this is NM, but still shocking. That was probably the two most educational weeks I ever spent!! WT@F???
DEI in its entirety must be demolished. I know tons of brands who would rather not based on perception, but everyone will be thankful to truly have the best of the best back in a few short years. Demolished.
Very sad. And, the saddest part is that with each new (& current) woke 'ideal' that is thought up by these asleep people, groups, organisations, the growing rest of them follow, & follow quickly. Why do they follow quickly, simply & dissapointingly because once your on the train, there's no stopping it....
Great piece again Brad. You routinely hit on the most important topics we should all be discussing. Not that Lauren Boebert misbehaved in a theater.
Elon Musk started what I thought was the beginning of the end of the woke rot when he exited all the toxic woke employees of Twitter. Other firms have been following his lead. In my businesses, I require all hiring managers to use a list of questions that identify the level of woke rot in the candidates. They will not be hired if they have it. I also discriminate against certain schools and degree programs knowing they are highly infected with the woke rot.
Now, I am good with people having diverse views. The problem with having the woke rot is that at some level those beliefs are counter to what makes a good employees. For example, prioritizing identity grievance over actual productive results. Believing that there is no objective truth and every decision is just relative to power. Unfortunately those in deep with these views are toxic to the workplace and must be prevented from entering.
I have been considering that this cannot last in private industry because private business fails unless it operates as a functional meritocracy. The quality of products and services will decline with the decline in workforce capability. Owners thinking that they are virtue signaling to prevent activist attacks that hurt their sales will start to realize that a growing reputation for lower quality is a bigger business threat. I think that realization is there and many owners are quietly purging.
However, I do think that we need new legislation. I think we call it Civil Rights 3.0. For it we need to expand the requirements that all public and private institutions get significant sanctions for any actions that harm American constitutional rights. Specifically, no organization of size should be allowed to discriminate based on political orientation or any historical record of speech... as it conflicts with 1A rights. I think it is fine to assess and test ideas and values to accept or reject candidates... but fairly for each person. Selection based on racial, gender or other identity attributes is already in violation of civil rights laws, we just need to strengthen them and include penalties. Big tech needs to lose Section 230 protections if they are not acting superficially as platforms and are censoring content (in effect controlling content like a publisher). Again, 1A protections need to be hammered in and enforced.
I think the woke thing will die itself because the logical and rational eventually win all the arguments. However, we might need help by government intervention to expedite the death of woke as it is doing great damage to the republic today.
Excellent comment, thank you.
“I have been considering that this cannot last in private industry because private business fails unless it operates as a functional meritocracy.”
Something that rarely gets considered is that our system of intellectual property rights effectively grants monopoly status to these huge oligarchical companies such, for example, Google or Microsoft. They own a vast multitude of patents and an army of lawyers to enforce them. Consequently there cannot be the kind of competition that defines a free market economy.
That’s also why you have no alternative but to agree to their non-negotiable shrink wrap contracts. I recently encountered another bizarre form of these kinds of contracts of adhesion. Square, the company that operates many of these point of sale terminals (the ones that also demand you tip staff for self-serve restaurant counter service), sent me an email that I agreed to their revised terms of service. Odd because I don’t do any direct business with Square. Turns out that I have unknowingly provided my email address to companies using square terminals for the sole purpose of having the receipts emailed (handy if you are buying durable goods and want proof of purchase for warranty purposes). I think Home Depot was the culprit. Apparently Square thinks that provides them with sufficient grounds to unilaterally enforce their contract provisions on me.
Good point. This is part of the credentialing block. Bigs gravitate toward advantage. If government and other institutions protect them from the stress of upstart competition, they will happily endorse it.
Interesting that Musk makes most of his inventions public domain.
Excellent article.
It is so bizarre to me that people with families vote for this shit. Or at least tolerate it. Or feign that it doesn't exist.
I think we're close to a tipping point. IMO it comes down to suburban women.
We'll see what's more important; their children or the boogie man (insert Hitler).
Interestingly, it looks like single women are singlehandedly saving the Democratic Party. White liberals are also the primary drivers of wokeness. I think it's reasonable to assume single woke white women are a huge problem.
https://www.aei.org/articles/the-rise-of-the-single-woke-and-young-democratic-female/#:~:text=While%20married%20men%20and%20women,August%20decision%20overturning%20Roe%20v.
https://www.euphoricrecall.net/p/how-white-liberals-are-driving-wokeness
Right. Exactly.
Root cause:
Long march to annihilate the nuclear family.
Root cause of the aforementioned:
Lack of fatherly influence.
A perfect circle of moral/ethical/character debasement.
Don't assume. It's the truth. Just facts.
They will drive themselves into extinction hopefully, while continually poisoning the kids along the way. demographics may be destiny but it takes a while to manifest
I'm not hijacking, but I'm re-reading Christopher Lasch's amazingly prescient 1995 book “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy" and he says this:
"The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or 'alternative' institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all."
Lasch was a prophet and we are living through what he predicted, except instead of creating alternative institutions, the globalist progressive oligarchy (aka Social Justice Inc) have just embarked upon a full ideological takeover of our institutions (and society), using SJ dogma as litmus test, social shibboleth, loyalty oath and requirement for employment.
And as far as Michael Lind (who I enjoy): his proposal reminded me of a zombie movie when a character gets added midway: You know they're just gonna get eaten too!
By the end of the last century thinkers like Lasch, Rieff, Paglia, Allan Bloom etc could see this coming, but there was no stopping the elite decoupling from America and its transformation into a weird cross bw Ancien Regime nobility and the Jacobins who dethroned them.
Back then was the time to fight, when the enemy was amassed at our borders, not after they've captured and colonized every inch of territory. But American liberals failed to save liberalism because they couldn't withstand the Left's superweapon, the Bigotry Accusation, and conservatives failed because they devoted 2 generations of energy to making money and starting wars.
The only way forward for culture is SAMIZDAT—creating and performing outside official channels, sort of like the underground in pre-60s America—and the only way forward for anyone else is to flee to the Red States, where the SJocracy is less firmly entrenched.
Excellent comment as always.
Thanks, Brad!
Keep servin em up!
Thx for reading material!
I missed that one back in the day.
Love Lasch, his last book is great. You're gonna be shocked it was written almost 30 yrs ago...
They are taking over existing institutions because they lack the stuff required to build their own from the ground up.
It is a bit like the UAW members striking. They want more from the business that they have no clue how, and no interest in working so hard, to start, run and own themselves.
Hard times create strong men that create good times that create weak men that create hard times. We are living in a time of weak men... that ironically are largely biological women.
hey, the mafia weren't necessarily able to start their own trucking cos or labor unions, but they they still got control of them...and yes these are weak times, back in the day you shed blood to gain control, now you shed tears...
True, but the mafia was primarily interested in money, and thus they also understood very well the meritocracy of production. The wokesters don't care about money as much as they care about status, belonging and power attained though their cult practices. So the woke rot is detrimental to business as the primary goal of business, like the mafia, is to make money.
You are so right about the tears vs direct competition. However, they are just as nasty as the mafia but in a passive aggressive way. I call them crybullies.
It’s baffling watching these “libs of tictoc “ types (as was stated; mostly white, single women) ranting on about the most ridiculous things, none of which make any sense...until you realize that these (mostly) women have no real meaning in their lives, and being a social justice warriors gives them a sense of purpose; they hold on to these causes with such fervour because without them, they are nothing.
And for the love of all that is still good, we need to stop calling these zealots "progressive", as they are anything but. They are no more "progressive" than lemmings "progressing" off of a cliff.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are the three most heavily abused words in the entire Newspeak language.
Yeah and it's all built on a foundation of phony racism.
Funny how that was exploited to the point of inversion; where now the racism is real and glorified - indeed monetized.
It has become the foundational principle of progressive Leftism.
We can all thank Obama for setting race relations back 70 years.
I don't think we can really blame Obama for that though.
I don't know. I'm solid genX.
There was certainly some racism when I grew up in the 70's. But by the time I left college it had nearly been vanquished.
Nobody was even "thinking" about racism until he stoked it again for his own expediency.
I don't pin it all on him...but he used it to get the bully pulpit, to keep it and enrich himself at the expense of the very people he claimed to defend.
I don't know; it's just a depressing subject.
You do such an excellent job of connecting the dots regarding the cancer of Wokeism that has infiltrated this country and the world. I just long to find a reason to believe that it didn't all make so much sense.
Bingo!
I think one big limiting factor of this cultural Marxism is that Marxism usually isn't sustainable because it doesn't produce positive results and will fail in the face of free market competition. I think it would be a good idea to focus on creating alternative institutions that are apolitical - or even take back the institutions that have been subverted.
There is a certain kind of apathy that lead to this in the first place, people who just want to do their jobs and not engage in politics at all. So you got colleges where the power slowly moved from the faculty to the administrators with the false promise that faculty could then focus on science and teaching instead of bureaucracy. Instead they now have to deal with two bureaucracies, the internal one in the administration and the external in the government. When 50 students sign a letter to block a hire and the rest of the students don't engage then this tiny minority gets their way. A big part of the problem of course is for the majority to recognize they're the majority - I think there needs to be a way to break through the culture of fear that pervades a lot of institutions. It took a very long time for example for people in e.g. Poland or East Germany to recognize that the communists weren't that powerful after all.
"I think one big limiting factor of this cultural Marxism is that Marxism usually isn't sustainable because it doesn't produce positive results and will fail in the face of free market competition."
Exactly. Free trade works, because it incentivises real-world thinking. In a free society, the woke fail, because they cannot harness the productive to their ends, which leaves them impotent. Atlas shrugs.
It takes my breath away to hear we have *too much* freedom! Lind is looking in the wrong direction. We need to identify all the ways government control has *caused* this situation, and step-by-step undo them. For example, get government *out* of education.
As to the claim government can be the solution, the Twitter Files, I think, should have put that idea to rest.
It's precisely because government gets their fingers in everything that everything is becoming politicized. People who think all we need is to drain the swamp and make the government institutions somehow better are deluding themselves. At least with the free market and private sector we have the opportunity to create alternatives.
You are saying the answer is to give the govt more power? Even though they appear to be bribing corporations to tow the line? Give more power to elected officials, when trust in fair elections is at an all-time low? I don’t know the answer, but I cannot agree. I think the answer is in more parallel systems and offering alternatives to people who don’t want to play along
No, not advocating that, merely exploring Michael Lind's prescription. I'm inclined to agree with you.
I reflexively recoil in horror at the suggestion that government control is the best solution to anything.
Right?! To the contrary- the government is quite content to watch society self destruct...the Canadian government, in Klaus’ words, has been infiltrated by the WEF and they have been hell bent on polarizing every aspect of society.
Same. I think the new right is at least acknowledging that, a la rufo, you need to use government that exists rather than cede it to your opponents because the ratchet only goes one way. There is no frontier away from the bureaucrats until we get to Mars at best so what else is there to do
Use it to eradicate the rot, but then if you have ratcheted it up another notch, how do you stop it from being used against you again? Not sure if I trust that it could be used in this way but then scaled back down.
Brad, you rejuvenate me.
Woke is a form of Kafka's Metamorphosis writ species wide and incarnate:
Human beings as hive insect.
DEI hiring and college admissions could be seen as a way to shelve hordes of useless parasites who, if put to real work, would only cause problems and system failures. Keep them away from people who are useful or learning to be useful.
Let the DEIs rot in their blighted urban hellholes, imagining that their lives and beings are superior somehow. Good riddance.
WoQuaeda = one of the best descriptions of them I've ever seen!! Excellent essay as always!
Since when do you see and decide everything through the lens of murdering babies?? Since when do you let men take over women's sports? It's all so weird; when I was a young woman, girls didn't get abortions; they went to stay at either an out of town relative's home or at a "home" for pregnant girls. Now Title IX and women's sports are badly damaged or destroyed.
There is what I call 'the pregnant teenager school'. They aren't taught to take care of their babies AND continue their education. They are only taught how to take care of the babies and get on any and all public assistance possible. I talked to the ONE GIRL who planned to return to school and/or get her GED while she raised her baby. One out of 200!!
On my last day, I answered the phone and took a message from a woman calling said she wanted to enroll her ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD daughter at the school. She then said she had gone to that school too. Another pregnant girl came in to register with her daughter holding her hand. She couldn't have been more than 16. Those girls weren't getting an education at all. Of course this is NM, but still shocking. That was probably the two most educational weeks I ever spent!! WT@F???
Sorry to be so long winded but to comment, I had to set up the backstory. I want people to know!
No worries at all, it's a great comment!
DEI in its entirety must be demolished. I know tons of brands who would rather not based on perception, but everyone will be thankful to truly have the best of the best back in a few short years. Demolished.
Never never never give $ to higher ed for any reason including tuition!
Very sad. And, the saddest part is that with each new (& current) woke 'ideal' that is thought up by these asleep people, groups, organisations, the growing rest of them follow, & follow quickly. Why do they follow quickly, simply & dissapointingly because once your on the train, there's no stopping it....