"It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like." Wow, that's it in a nutshell.
CC, Do us all a favor and read the article....You'll find that you agree with most of it. Please grow up or go away. From an ancient conservative with a capital R.
No, you ignored it and gave a childish response that is not going to open civil dialog with anyone. How is your response productive on a site trying to build bridges?
Kevin........That's a purely junior high post. Don't you get that she's fed up with the BS on the far left too? Your comment doesn't fit here where there is decorum and intelligence. Please grow up and have an ounce of comprehension.
Yeah it should have been clear that I was *agreeing* with her point that the left is now less adversarial to corporations and I was making a secondary point about why they are so pro-Pfizer in this particular case.
I never make junior high posts. That’s ridiculous. You are being a poppy pants and your backpack is old and unfashionable.
A corporation is a faceless entity. Attacking a corporation does not feel satisfying because you cannot see who you are hurting and how they are flinching. Attacking individuals is a lot more fun and more self-satisfying because by attacking 1 on 1 you are now on a more level playing field. You can feel your own superiority and witness how you affect your target.
Kind of twisted?
I agree with Ms. Henley that we need to be in the bigger conversation and not about identity.
This is important precisely because the Anglosphere has always been the well spring of freedom and liberal society and is now backsliding into an Orwellian nightmare. It is important to all because it can end in one of three ways 1) the same Orwellian nightmare to which it is spiraling 2) a violent spasm and orgy of rage by the deplorables who will rise up to sweep the self-proclaimed elites and their acolytes from power and confiscate their ill-gotten gains or 3) a return to sanity and cleansing of the woke madness. Right now I prefer option 3 but inch toward option 2 with each new offense by lunatic left.
I am thinking that option 2 was the first Trump presidency and the more time passes the more convinced I am that there WILL be a second one.
I remember Michael Moore saying that the Trump election was the biggest "F You" ever to the establishments of both parties and I still believe he was right.
A second Trump presidency will be a big "FU" to the progressive left and a reaction to the Biden presidency.
Saw yesterday that the betting odds of Trump winning another term are now 3-1 in his favor and Biden is at 9-2 against him. It was the complete opposite last Feb.
The question is: How will the progressive left respond to being told off?
My guess? The response will be dramatic and probably violent. That group is populated by Woke religious fanatics and a lot of life's dead enders with nothing to lose. These are the people of instant gratification, participation trophies and helicopter parents. They do not accept that they do not get what they want.
I can't stand Trump, but even I can admit he brought a more realistic approach to border security, China, and he did good work with the Abraham Accords and trying to reverse the trend of jobs being outsourced overseas to take advantage of cheap labour.
I am one of the rare liberals I know that can look at the man's actions with clear eyes. Pretty much everyone else I know has severe TDS. My husband's mom starts screaming if I even mention his name.
They won’t let Trump win again. They will send the military to enforce election “safety/freedom” because, they will say, the elections are being run by dozens of Bull Connor figures in various swing states. That plus Zuckerberg will spend $2 billion this time.
It will be pitched as the equivalent of Eisenhower sending the 101st Airborne to ensure the Little Rock Nine could attend desegregated schools.
I hope your wrong. Because if your right, there will be an armed insurrection this time.
I'm also not all that sure that the government could count on the military at this point. Just not. And I work with the military every day.
Yes, they have been purging people from the armed forces they think are extremists but I really do not think you could get the army or marines to step up like that reliably anymore.
Don't bet on that. Human nature is funny. All it takes is one thing to ignite the spark. Was a tax on tea really what sent a swarm of patriots, mad as hornets, to the road from Concord to Boston? There is a well spring of rising anger and playing with armed patriots is playing with fire. And progressives are just dumb enough to strike that match.
But this next time there will be pushback. And even the Dept of Injustice will not be able to gaslight their way out of it. Could they really jail millions?
That's why the DOJ got busy creating a "Domestic Terrorism Force" as of last week. Gotta put a match to that gaslight at this point. It won't take millions. Just the "trumped up," abject and very celebrated humiliation and destruction of specifically chosen figures on the front lines. I'll bet they already have a list.
There is controlling money behind that movement. The hands which deliver the money provide the steering. Go read up on Open Society. It all sounds so innocuous, but the goal is global governance.
They are trying to pre-impeach him with that nonsense January 6th committee right now. Incredible resources and time spent trying to bring him down over and over again by the usual suspects for six years now.
Not so sure about those odds. I think they'll change if Trump's recorded demand to 'find' roughly 12000 votes to Georgia's Republican Secretary of State after the election is prosecuted by the Atlanta District Attorney. It might be difficult to win even his party's nomination if your man is being charged by the State of Georgia with vote tampering. Though, since the Republicans have become a party committed to the cult worship of one man, anything is possible. So I could be wrong.
2. If he were going to be charged with anything it would have happened. The best shot of that was going to be if the Jan 6 Committee had been truly bipartisan and had found a smoking gun and if that was gonna happen it would have already. Plus..
a) 76% of those recently polled did not think the events rose to an insurrection but were a mob that got out of control and rioted.
b) It is not even in the top 10 of concerns among all voters and not in the top 6 for democrats.
c) The committee is likely to be disbanded as soon as the republicans take the house in the fall.
3. Those are betting odds as of yesterday, not my opinion or anyone elses individual opinion but the collected opinion of people who put money down on bets. You can make of that what you will but my experience is that people who take bets and those who make them collectively seem to generally be close to the mark. Just a data point.
We could spend all day on various theories and speculations as to why things are as they are and what is or is not likely to happen but it is not a stretch to say that there is a general consensus that the democrats have very very badly messed up on a lot of fronts and are very likely to pay a very steep price next year. What happens after....who knows but it is not unreasonable to presume that things are not going to get better for the democrats going from Jan 2023 on.
A WHOLE lot could happen between then and the start of the next presidential election. Biden could drop dead of old age. Trump could drop dead. Trump could decide not to run and back the FL governor, be a king maker rather than a king so he does not have to deal with the media or the democrats and can keep making money. Biden could decide not to run and the democrats actually find a candidate that will manage to overcome the hole that the progressives and Biden have dug.
One thing I think IS safe to say....the progressive political agenda is dead for at least a decade.
I have no time for a well-considered answer right now, as I have to go to work, but I cannot just let these "labels" pass without comment. I apparently am a deplorable, having been a life-long dem who voted for Trump. I do not support an "orgy of rage" just now, although our current administration in the US. certainly deserves it.
If you support option 2 you are a Bolshevik. You've lost faith in democracy and the belief in debate and compromise. (By the way does this include the Trump family's "ill-gotten gains"?) You've lost faith in the idea of an open pluralistic society and you've decided that authoritarianism is the answer.
My advice? Learn to live with the fact that there are LGBTQ people in the world, and they deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Learn to recognize that there really is such a thing as White privilege and support efforts to help the less privileged catch up (i.e., more spending on education and job training). Rather than using violence to even things out, start voting to tax the rich to help the poor and working class of all races and and gender identities.
You say you support option 3, but what does that look like? LGBTQ folks go back in the closet? We go back to ignoring the myriad ways that Black people have been systematically disadvantaged?
WOW....Just WOW Matt. That is WAY WAY over the top.
Let me lay some things out for you.
1. Most of us out here just do NOT give a rats ass about LGBTQ ..XYZ. Just not even in out thoughts good or bad. We are mostly, completely and utterly indifferent. Ya aint special in any way shape or form. Your either an asshole or your not. You either do your job or you do not. Your a good neighbor or you are not. Are there people out there who do care? Sure. But they are an annoying minority that we basically put in the same class as the melodramatic farts that write comments like yours that assume we care at all.
2. Pretty sure you meant reactionary Fascist instead of Bolshevik....but I'm guessing you do not read a lot of history.
3. We only want you in a closet if your an annoying pain in the ass whose sanctimonious celebration of victim hood is getting on our nerves.
4. There is a reasonable argument to be made that over the last 40 yrs Black people have ACTUALLY been systematically ADVANTAGED. Certainly government setasides for Black owned business is a structural advantage. Certainly affirmative action and systems to enforce diversity over merit are structural advantages. Honestly, being really truly honest, if domestically born black people are failing today it is because of pathologies in their culture. African immigrants, ACTUAL AFRICAN IMMIGRANTS, not African-Americans ( a term BTW that annoys a lot of Africans ) are doing better by far than most ethnic groups. Nigerians in particular, with Ganan's right on their heals, are doing really well and beat all other ethnic groups, including White people, in terms of education and wealth growth. Indian immigrants, many of whom are far more black than most Black Americans, are ALSO doing exceptionally well in terms of education and climbing the economic ladder. SO...it aint the skin tone dude, its the attitude. But you wallow in that, you sit and whine and complain while the rest of these groups charge ahead. BTW....after domestically born Black people, the group that most supports black issues is White people. Hispanics, Asians and new African immigrants have the least amount of sympathy for Black Americans issues and in fact are more likely than White people to oppose special preferences. So suck it up, put on your big boy pants and get to work. Quit whining and thinking your special
You probably don't realize it, but 1 and 3 are in conflict. If you think people who have preferred pronouns that don't fit within your narrow definition of gender identity are pains in the asses, if you want them back in the closet, then you DO give a rats ass. You are, in fact, very angry about the issue.
On 4) The median household wealth of White families is $180,000. The median household wealth of Black families is $18,000. That's a lot of White privilege. There are reasons for this discrepancy that are related to generations of systematic abuse and disadvantage. (Slavery, Jim Crow, red-lining, reduced employment opportunities, poorly-funded schools, over policing, racist sentencing guidelines, etc.) You simply don't want to admit that this is the case. Probably because you assume that mitigating those disadvantages would some how mean taking things away from you, or from White people. But that is not the case. Read Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us. Also, this should be obvious but Immigrants did not experience those systematic disadvantages, so they did not grow up with generationally transferred social pathologies. (One of these pathologies is a learned sense of hopelessness about the future.)
The big problem with CRT/Antiracism is that it ENCOURAGES the pathology of helplessness. It teaches black youth that systemic racism is like a malevolent god; omnipresent, all-powerful, and determined to make their lives miserable.
No point studying for the SAT; it was "created to flunk black students". No point trying to get a job; capitalism was "invented to oppress black people". Nothing those poor black folk can do but sit around and wait for some White Saviors to rescue them.
Think the same thing. Your handicapping them before they ever get started.
Life is hard and it is not fair. Not for anyone and not in equal amounts.
I tell that to my kids all the time for two reasons. First, be grateful for what you have. Second, do not take if for granted and be prepared to work hard to just keep it. Nobody is going to come save you. You better be strong enough and equip yourself with the tools to take care of yourself.
I also tell them that it is perfectly possible to do all the right things and still fail. You can either whine about it and wallow in your misery or get off your ass and try again. THAT I have drummed in their heads since they were little. Eventually, if you do the right things over and over, despite any setbacks, you will get to where you want or need to go.
I think Kendi feels like he's discovered the perfect cash cow; getting paid $20,000 per hour to tell his audiences they are helpless unless democracy is ended and replaced with a woke junta.
I think he is a huxter who has figured out how to make a bunch of money spewing nonsense. He found a market and wrote intellectually weak philosophy to fill it.
The guy is no better than any other self help guru with a story to tell.
He is getting rich and laid on a foundation of the unearned guilt of White upper middle class women.
Do you seriously think that the words has the meaning (and the effect) according Webster? You are explaining the person that he is “oppressed” and this is the reason of his poor life position. In what way the person is expected to react? First, he is trying “to stop oppression”, right? He can require, he can demand, but the final solution depends on the oppressor. The oppressor can agree that he is a bad guy and stop oppression – and can disagree with this and go on oppression. So, the person is facing the dilemma – to resort to violence (at least some kind of violence), or agree that his faith depends on others (on the will of the oppressor).
Nice dilemma, hah? I can agree? though, that logic is not a strong feature of a mob of "appressed", and demagogues are not usually appealing to the reasoning.
What you are essentially saying is that the median White family has an income that puts them in the top 5% of income earners. That is just impossible. MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.
Tell ya what, you come to DC sometime and you will see PLENTY of wealthy Black people running around.
SO...we agree then, there are social pathologies at work in the domestically born Black community. They are UNIQUE to the domestically born Black community. And really, we are talking about the URBAN domestically born Black community.
Well dude, nothing the government or any special conditions offered is gonna change that. That is internal and it gets reinforced from parent to child, handed down like a family heirloom. There is NOTHING that is going to change that until they choose to change it themselves. There is very very little if any real systemic issues apart from attitude and inter-generational poverty keeping these people back.
AND....you just might want to ask yourself why it is that Black people in the US had higher rates of education and higher rates of business and home ownership BEFORE the 1960's. Ya know, back in the day when 80% of black children were born into two parent households before the term "baby mama" became part of the social lexicon.
Very incomplete thinking, Matt. Yes, black Americans have had to overcome the institution and residues of slavery, but to blame wealth discrepancies on "white privilege", then say immigrants are immune to white privilege is nonsensical. if I'm walking down the street, do you think if I can tell (or care) if a black person is from Belize, Benin or the Bronx? Those "inauthentic" black immigrants simply bring more of those "white privilege" values such as working hard, saving more and delaying gratification, a higher willingness to participate in employer-sponsored retirement plans, a higher rate of intact (2 parent) families and yes - better K-12 education in many poorer countries than our inner city public schools offer. These are all attributes that the African American community enjoyed in the post world war II era. The Voting Rights Act was a crowning achievement, but the Great Society and the entitlement culture that followed hollowed out the well-being and overall health of many American families and communities, probably none more so than the inner city African American community. Many African Americans dodged that bullet - 12% of the middle class is Black, and they are 13% of the U.S. population, i.e. they have the same proportional representation that whites and Hispanics do. But, sadly, many have not, and we have work to do to eradicate the New Plantation, where the new Master is the government, that doles out a dependency-generating stipend and offers below 3rd world education and criminal domination of neighborhoods, all the while maintaining compliance with the narrative that "racism" is holding them back. Liberals destroyed the lives of millions in order to "help" them, and now they want to blame their failures on conservatives who are suddenly all racist. Nice try. It doesn't even fly in the African American community any more. They know they've been had.
I've heard all of those arguments. The idea that the government is ruining people's lives by doling out "dependency-generating stipends" is simply not true. Have you looked at what happens when people receive universal basic income? It tends to make their lives better and more manageable.
And generations of systemic deprivation and abuse leads to social pathologies that pass on from generation to generation. Immigrants arrive without those generational burdens.
Maybe we agree that we need to dramatically improve the quality of our educational system. Of course that will require more funding, which is probably where we would part ways again.
You cannot correct for those pathologies by enabling them.
Matt, I will grant you that those pathologies were in no small part created in response to racial disparities. Not going to argue that.
What I will argue is the following...
1. The sins of the father do NOT fall on the son. We do not want to go there if for no other reason than that no group or race has its hands clean if your willing to go back and look. None of us of any color would be clean.
2. There is nothing that we, today, can do to amend the hurt done in the past to people who are gone. For those alive today who lived under Jim Crowe? For them we could probably do something and perhaps should. What exactly I am not sure, but something to support them would not be out of line.
3. For this generation? We cannot fix the pathologies in their community. We do not have the power. I cannot imagine anyone I know, had they a magic wand to wave and make it all better who would not do so. But the problems are such that only they can fix them. We cannot parent their children. We cannot force them to stop having babies they cannot afford out of wedlock. We cannot make black men stick around to father children and even if we could many of them never had fathers themselves so they have no idea what that means or how to do it. We cannot get rid of drugs. God knows we have tried. We cannot simply stop them from killing each other or getting into gangs or committing crimes. Those things are all personal choices we cannot control. How do we stop them from celebrating Gangsta culture and misogynistic music? God help us if we even tried. We cannot be there to assure their kids do their homework. We MIGHT be able to help parents with no schooling learn how to help their kids but how many of them would take the opportunity. How can we help them when they think that things like attention to detail, hard work, logic are white oppression? How can we help them progress when they insist that speaking proper English is another form of racism?
They need to CHOOSE and then they need to execute. We can support them in some small ways...but really...its out of our power.
Tell ya something else, they better get that together before Whites are no longer the majority because once that ends its gonna be really hard to convince a culture dominated by successful Latinos and Asians that THEY have a responsibility to fix the problems in the Black community. THEY are gonna have ZERO sympathy.
I'll give you this, Matt - you are a progressive down the line. Where UBI has been tried, the amounts tend to be immaterial, and the post-mortems suggest little constructive or destructive change in behaviors, but that recipients tended to "feel good" about the extra cash. Brilliant. The one exception is Iran, where UBI is substantial. But it is received in exchange for compliance on social and political viewpoints - the real point of UBI.
As for education, there is a LOT of data both domestically and globally. Spoiler alert: there is no correlation between spending and outcomes. Homework assignment: compare the specific spending of a given public school's revenues with that of a private school. Then go audit the classrooms of each for a couple days. Then we'll talk about education and spending.
The ignorance is not an argument, though. Chinese people came to US with the history of thousands years of oppressions, Jews came to US with the history of the hundred years of oppressions, and the history of the racism and oppressions went on in US for a while. Where is "the social pathology"?
You are digging in the wrong direction, Matt. The answer do exist, but you hesitate to see it.
Dear Matt, the difference in results (“the median household wealth of White families is $180,000, the median household wealth of Black families is $18,000”) by itself means NOTHING. It is the wrong idea that everybody should have the same results in “the life race”, or there are “oppression”. The mistake is quite natural, though, under the circumstances that racists used to explain the failure of “black community folks” by genetic reasons; this explanation is apparently wrong.
The reason of “black disaster” is purely and solely common wrong “social attitude” inside the “black community”. Have black people problems in their life? True, they do. Are some of these problems originating from racist attitude toward them? Yes, it is. The issue is that the community as the entire “black community” (but not all of black people!) are focused on the problems and “injustice” instead of finding opportunities and using ‘em.
Jews in Russian Empire (and –let’s tell true – partially in US as well) experienced a severe discrimination in past; nevertheless, now this is one of the most successful communities in Russia and in US as well. Chinese immigrants in US also experienced a severe discrimination and (by the way!) tremendous racist-based pressure (comparable with the ant-black racism) in the second part of 19th and first part of 20th centuries. Now these are one of the most successful “minority communities” in US (having median household wealth over US average. There are many other examples around the globe.
Moreover, there are enough “white households” with the wealth below $18,000. Are they also “oppressed” in some way (as Bolsheviks thought), or are there different “black social patterns” and “white social patterns” (the “racially correct physics and math” are in the offing)?
Your side of this cultural divide is very angry about the idea of people using pronouns that don't fit within your side's narrow definitions of gender identity. That upsets me, because I know people who are on the receiving end of that anger.
More like fed up with straight up obnoxious people who want to foist their annoying foibles on the rest of us while we are dealing with the actually important things in life like raising kids and paying mortgages and living OUR lives.
Do you HONESTLY think most of us give a damn what someone wants to call themselves? Really?
We all have THREE issues with this whole thing....maybe FOUR.
BUT...before I proceed, I will simply say that I DO believe that there are people born with what amounts to as a birth defect in which their internal gender identity does not align with their biological sex. I sure as hell do not believe the numbers we are seeing with this and think to a certain degree, among young people being gender fluid, bi, trans ...whatever has become fashionable. Being gay is passe, so 1980s.
1. STOP trying to tell us that some hormones and surgery are going to convert someone from one sex to another. That crap is done at the DNA level. You can create some sort of Frankenstein person that looks like the other sex but will NEVER BE the other sex. Period.
2. Identifying as something does not make it true. If that were the case then I would identify as a Black Woman and apply to the SBA for a Woman & Minority Owned business certification and double my business. Heck, I would identify as a disabled Eskimo and REALLY get some government business. We do NOT think it smart to allow any boy that claims he is a girl to enter a woman's bathroom or locker room. Why? Are we terrified of "trans people"? NO...We just know that there are asshole, predatory men who are just nuts enough to make that claim for a chance to engage in sexual assaults. Were we RIGHT? Yep and we do not think that the feelings of a trans person trump our daughters, wives and sisters safety. PERIOD. We really just do NOT CARE about what issues you have with gender dysphoria. Not our problem until you make it our problem. NOR do we think it is fair or safe to allow people who transition from male to female to compete in women's sports. Got nothing to do with whether or not they should be allowed to compete in sports but everything to do with fair play and safety and those of us with daughters are determined that there be a fair playing field for them. Just look at the disaster in women's swimming. Now ask us how we would feel about allowing those same trans girls to swim with girls but be ranked against other trans girls in a separate division and I think you would be surprised at how many of us would be absolutely fine with that.
3. Look, you show up looking like a girl...your gonna get girl pronouns. You show up looking like a boy..your gonna get boy pronouns. Your not special. Your not unique and nobody cares about your feelings any more than you care about theirs or they care about anyone else's. Get over it. This sense of having to be special and having to be oversensitive is what annoys people. You mistake anger for frustration of having to deal with additional stupidity in our busy lives because some jackass thinks they deserve special treatment.
Bottom line, trans, gender fluid, WHATEVER.....get this through your head...we are more annoyed by your sense of entitlement, nasty attitudes, hyper sensitivity, the general idea that you think your special cuz of a birth defect, than the fact that you have the birth defect.
And I said birth defect just to annoy you. BUT...logically speaking, if your born with a body that does not align with your brain and it requires surgical intervention....then birth defect might just not be out of line.
Ya know, the more I think about it the more I think these people do what they do for attention. Its like they have a need to be special in some way and this is a way for them to do it.
Its an issue of self esteem.
But what can you expect from a generation that grew up with participation trophies, being told they are special and unique by their parents and basically molly coddled from birth.
You only get real self esteem from real achievement and that only comes from hard work, being willing to fail and knowing how to get back up anyway.
Nobody is special at everything. Most of us are special only to our families. Not everyone is gonna be Tom Brady or Paveratti. Not everyone is gonna be Elon Musk or Michael Jackson. These people need to learn that there is value in just being a good person, good son or sister, a good member of the community. Just do your best and be decent to other people. But they all want to be social media influencers. They all want to be important on a large stage and they do not want to hear that that requires three things, only one of which they can control.
Thank you for that spot on retort. And allow me to add, we don't give a fig about what pronouns you care to use on your e-mail. Just stop insisting that the rest of us play along with it.
You're going to insist on everyone else conforming to your understanding of gender identity? How would you feel if society decided to treat you like a woman, and call you a woman?
There are some people who feel that they have really inherited a title of the King, and ask others to refer to them as to "your majesty", if they don't want to upset 'em...
LGBTQ people exist. They are not faking it to gain some advantage, as you seem to be suggesting. And they are frequently bullied and belittled and discriminated against by people who think like you. Then, when they choose to fight back, you call them annoying and say they are acting entitled.
you: "Do you HONESTLY think most of us give a damn what someone wants to call themselves? Really?"
Yes. Obviously you do give a damn. And I think that because I'm reading the words that you wrote.
You are a sloppy thinker, Matt. LGBTQ people are not all or even mostly trans. Stop lumping them together. Moreover, try reading what I wrote. I said we don't care what you call yourselves, just stop insisting we play along. Now run along and play. Soon it will be nap time.
Honestly? I really would not give a shit. Why the hell should I care about what somebody else thinks or what they have to say?
Who are they to me?
The only people whose opinions matter are my friends and my family. Even my family I can blow off cuz some of them are straight up jackasses.
You worry WAY WAY too much about your feelings when you should just toughen the fuck up and blow off shit instead of making it into a big deal. Far more important things in life to worry about.
Your generation never would have survived our youth where sticks and stones was the rule. You go through life thinking that your entitled to never be offended, that other people are responsible for your feelings. Sorry, we all deal with it and YOU are responsible for your own feelings, nobody else. Get over yourself.
You DO realize that by giving other people the ability to impact your feelings, to really get you spun up with words, you are actually empowering them to control you right? Your handing them a lever they can use to piss you off and rattle you and make you act out. Your empowering them and telling them that you are. That is nuts and a recipe for making yourself a victim and miserable.
Who exactly was one of the very first voices calling for legalizing gay marriage? Donald Trump. Who was a very good friend of Donald Trump, and a regular shopping buddy to Donald Trump? The very gay—flamboyant in fact—singer Liberace. According to an earlier BariWeiss story, the first Northeastern US golf courses open to Blacks and Jews were the golf courses owned by Donald Trump.
Spit out the Kool-Aid, do your own research, see just how homophobic and racist is this Donald Trump character.
Common Sense does a great job exposing new voices who have freed themselves from old media. However at some point these voices need to band together to create a true competitor to NYT, WaPo, etc. My view is there are too many individual voices on substack who should be working together.
Substack needs to start offering a deal where you can subscribe to a certain number of writers for a fee that is more than a single subscription, but less than what you would pay for all of them individually.
Agreed. I keep thinking of Batya Ungar Sargon's thesis that a big part of what's caused journalism to cater only to the loaded is putting every damn thing behind paywalls so that the only clicks they get are from people with the money to spare. If Substack puts every good writer behind a paywall, what's to keep it from getting just as bad faster?
Yes, exactly. As others write below, SubStack needs to adopt a payment system. Look into BAT (Basic Attention Token) as a payment model. Perhaps, I can read the first paragraph of an essay for free, but if I wish to read the entire essay, it costs say 0.2 BAT which is worth about 25 cents US.
I love this idea because I'm not always interested in all of the content on a substack nor do I have time to read everything. This approach would allow me to read more authors.
My resignation letter to my government agency will sound similar to this one.
A beautifully articulate explanation of the times we are currently living in. The best of luck Tara, I have subscribed to your substack and look forward to your work.
There was a bumper sticker in the late 60s that said, “You’re not paranoid. They really are out to get you!” My friends and I laughed. We are not laughing anymore. I absolutely agree with Tara’s observation that this phenomena began on university campuses and has spread from there. We see weak national leadership, indoctrination rather than education, the rise of anti- semitism, concentrated power and wealth in the hands of a few, deteriorating honest journalism, a lack of questioning what is going on among most people, and an overvalued stock market. It’s beginning to look like the 1920s and 1930s all over again and it’s coming from both political extremes. Tara and Bari. You are two strong fighters for freedom of speech and honest journalism. Brava to you both.
That's exactly what the woke say too - they hate the "false equivalency" between them fighting for equality and justice, and reactionaries fighting for voter suppression, systemic racism, and patriarchy.
They'll of course say that "if anything, progressives need to push back and push back hard".
Such is tribalism. In reality, both left-wing and right-wing politics are sliding into authoritarianism.
First of all, I thought you might like this quote: “ When I call myself a conservative, what I really mean is that I am a traditional liberal in the old fashioned sense of the term. Bret Stephens The NY Times” I’m no longer a fan of The NY Times (and agree with Bari Weiss as to why she left) and I don’t totally disagree with your observation. Clearly most of the radicalism is coming from the left but I suggest not ignoring the right either. In politics, wealth and even religion, the middle ground is disappearing and the extremes are growing. As the old saying says, “If you’re not concerned, you’re not paying attention.” Be well.
Insofar as the middle ground is disappearing, this is overwhelmingly the (deliberate) doing of the Wokesters, likely much at the behest of their social media pals/ masters.
I’m not sure I can blame this on one group or on political leaning. I’ve watching process developing as far back as the 60’s, mostly in But not exclusive to the West Coast. If I am to understand so-called “woke culture”, it began decades before.
Are you serious? Right now we have an ex-president pushing blatant lies about a free and fair election and a Republican party enabling him, attempting to pass laws and install compliant election officials in places that will help them pull off the steal they failed at last time. Listen to Steve Bannon's podcast or Dan Bongino's show, which combined have millions of listeners. They are practically calling for civil war - Bannon in particular is pushing seditious falsehoods and encouraging the next coup attempt. And that's not even mentioning the blatantly fake nonsense regularly spewed by OAN, Newsmax, and Fox News.
We are edging precariously close to the brink of armed conflict and civil war, because a terrifyingly large segment of the right has decided that it no longer wishes to respect the norms of truth, democracy, or civility, and prefers waving it's guns around and engaging in Turner Diaries fantasies about the coming revolution. Reference the recent Turning Point USA convention where someone stood up and asked Charlie Kirk "when do we start killing these people?"
We all know the problems of the left. Don't come back at me with whataboutisms regarding BLM riots or woke media bias. We're all aware.
But if you're blind to what's happening on the right, you've got your head in the sand. The radical right is feeding off the radical left, and vice versa. And the right is a far bigger threat to the structural integrity and physical safety of our democracy right now. Trump broke our long history of Presidential election losers gracefully conceding, which is the lynchpin of our democracy, and has a quarter of this country now believing that the last election was stolen from them and that they will be justified in whatever underhanded means they use to take back power. At least the left is still respecting legitimate democracy.
There is good evidence that 2020 wasn't a fair presidential election. Zuckerbucks are one of many biased interventions that helped Biden. As Time magazine admiringly puts it: "a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information". (https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/).
No other country in the world has changed how it votes because of Covid. Everyone else just lined up (with extra spaces between) and voted as usual (sometimes in bigger rooms). There was no need for all that mail-in voting. Very few countries allow mail-in voting because they recognise that it is prone to problems. There is no way to prove who voted and that they voted free of any intimidation. Mail-in ballots aren't secret ballot votes.
Unfair elections in the US aren't unusual, Nixon, Gore and Kerry had good reasons for thinking they were shafted. But it was Clinton & Obama that wouldn't concede. They did in public, but behind the scenes they set the "insurance policy" of the Russian investigation farce into motion. While Trump talks a good fight, Clinton & Obama actually acted to de-legitimise Trump.
"No other country in the world has changed how it votes because of Covid."
As a Canadian, no other country HAD to change much. Australia gives everyone a guaranteed paid day off work on election day (federal law), so people had plenty of time to stagger their trips to the polling station. Canada has wide open advance voting, so it's more like Election Week rather than Election Day.
The US is uniquely obstructionist in its voting practices (mostly due to Republicans), so Covid gave Democrats a valid reason to force through a bunch of changes that they already wanted to make anyway.
Opportunistic? Sure. Self-serving? Absolutely. Fraudulent? Not even close. The votes for Biden were real; Democrats just made voting for Biden (or Trump or whoever) much easier/more convenient.
Delusional. But keep yammering. US polls are open to accommodate voters, usually from 6 am to 7 to 9 pm. Moreover, ballots are available to any showing a need. If voting is too difficult for a person, maybe they shouldn't be voting.
"If voting is too difficult for a person, maybe they shouldn't be voting."
That's Republican electioneering in a nutshell; make voting as inconvienient and difficult as possible, so that voter turnout drops down through attrition. The lower the voter turnout, the higher the probability of a Republican victory. Nothing scares Republican strategists more than the prospect of too many American citizens coming out to exercise their voting rights.
Democrats outmaneuvered Republicans in 2020 by making voting much easier and more convenient, using Covid as an alibi. As a result, voter turnout was at an all-time high.
Doesn't mean what they did was "fraud"; if anything increasing voter turnout makes the results MORE representative of the will of the people, not less.
The point was that voting in most counties continued to be voting in-person on the day with ID. As before Covid. Yes, Canada changed some things, which led to queues in Toronto. Everyone else carried on much the same as before.
Actually the US is pretty much average. Few places have provisional voting like the US. Almost everywhere requires ID. Voting by mail is popular in a few countries, but usually it is restricted to absentee voting. The voting hours are a little shorter in the US than in some other places. Some countries allow non-citizens to vote.
I think you will find that Democrats are just as good at tilting elections when they get the chance.
I didn't say they were fraudulent, I said they were good reasons to think they were unfair. Far more Zuckerbucks went to places that voted Democratic than Republican. This drove up the turnout in Democratic areas. So the equivalent of the tactic of having more voting machines and polling places in Republican areas. This is exactly what Kerry's campaign complained about in Ohio in 2004. Neither is fair, it has to be equally easy or hard for everyone to vote for an election to be fair.
Wow, you must work for Gateway Pundit. Nice job of completely misrepresenting an article with an out-of-context quote to give the impression that Trump's claims have the imprimatur of legitimate media. I heartily recommend people actually read the article that you referenced. Here's the gist:
"The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted."
Oh, and the quote you referenced? Let's see the surrounding text:
"That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures."
Paranoid fever dream indeed.
I'm well aware of the importance of the secret ballot. But in practice, it would be almost impossible to coordinate a mass intimidation campaign enough to swing the results of a Presidential election without it being noticed. And even if that wasn't the case, in person voting isn't secret anymore either. We live in a society where virtually every single adult walks around with a high definition video camera that fits in their pocket. Good luck trying to keep those out of the voting booth. I'm sure that will go over well with all the voters carrying concealed weapons these days. They've even mostly given up trying to ban them at live performances.
And your remark about other countries is misleading. Most other countries didn't need to make changes because they've already made voting easier. Voting is typically allowed over a period of several days rather than a single day, often on either a weekend or a national holiday so that people don't have to schedule their vote around going to work. Some of them even have secure online voting with a national voter ID card. Compared to the rest of the world, the US system has long been creaky and outdated, still scheduling voting on a Tuesday, the most inconvenient day of the week, because of some ancient justification involving travel time in the days of horse-drawn carriages (which is also why we still have this stupid Congressional ceremony to count Electoral votes instead of just declaring the results when they're submitted at the Electoral College, or just tallying them remotely as soon as they've all been certified). Mail-in voting was appropriate for the pandemic, and can go away when the threat recedes, but early voting is definitely something that should remain in place.
But the real reason Republicans want everyone to have to wait in line in election day is because they believe (as Trump once accidentally admitted) that lower turnout favors Republicans. Since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act they've passed various laws that would have never before passed muster, making it less convenient for people in poorer and more urban areas to vote. Also, Trump's exhortations for his supporters to not use the mail in ballots worked, which we knew well ahead of time from polling and party affiliation. Mail in ballots overwhelmingly favored Biden, which, combined with the high turnout and most states not being allowed to tally the mail-ins until the election night, virtually ensured the "blue wave" phenomenon that was predicted well in advance by numerous journalists and election experts. Many of whom also anticipated (from Trump's test-driving of this idea in Florida in 2018 - "must go with result on Election night!") that Trump would exploit this to claim that he'd actually won and the vote had been stolen from him.
And look what happened. Trump did exactly that. Despite plenty of advanced warning that we probably weren't going to know the results on election night, and attempts to educate voters that the idea of a vote being decided on election night was something of a mirage created by TV since the late 20th Century, millions of people bought into a scam they'd have been alerted to well in advance if they'd simply been paying attention to our supposedly horribly biased and unreliable mainstream media instead of watching Fox News.
Yes, I heartily agree people should read it, that's why I included the link.
The article is a good example of a Rorschach Test, as the authors knew. They knew what had happened would be seen by some as making the election unfair, so they spun it the other way as safeguarding the election. To one its rigging, to another its fortifying. But lets look at what the article says were concrete steps the groups took and see if those steps were fair or not?
1) "They got states to change voting systems and laws"
Mostly this seems to have been changing the rules followed by counties for how much checking to do on postal votes and to extend early voting. The checking changes weren't applied equally by all counties in a state. Some, mostly Republican, followed the old stricter rules, some, mostly democrat, followed the new looser ones. This gave an advantage to Biden. The changes to extend to early voting also probably helped Biden, the (mostly useless) polls had him further ahead in early October than early November.
2) "helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding."
Did this money go equally to every county? No, it went heavily to Democrat leaning counties. This gave an advantage to Biden.
3) "They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation"
Did this effect Trump and Biden equally? No. The suppression of the stories about the Biden families dodgy business dealings would by itself (judging by the exit polls) have been enough to swing the election to Trump.
4) "[A] national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks,"
This was fair, it couldn't have effected the result.
5) "there was a need to explain a rapidly changing election process. It was crucial for voters to understand that despite what Trump was saying, mail-in votes weren’t susceptible to fraud"
Mail-in votes are susceptible to fraud. Everyone knows this. Everyone agreed this was the case pre-Covid and pre-Trump. A simple case in point. A voter isn't supposed to vote in two states. Many people have lived and voted in more than one state, so they are on two states voter rolls. e.g. Snow Birds, in New York and Florida. In person its very difficult to vote twice, by mail it's easy.
Did this help Biden or Trump? Well given that it directly contradicted Trump and agreed with Biden it could hardly do anything other than help Biden.
In many places taking pictures in polling booths is illegal, even if it's of yourself. The point is more about chain of custody. If at some point someone gets a hold of the votes they can be altered, this might be done in person. I'll give you money if you vote the right way, or it might be done afterwards. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labour-s-stolen-votes
Voting in most countries is in-person, with ID, on the day. Some countries do vote over the weekend, many do not. Voting in-person during Covid is perfectly safe, so long as it is quick and the building is airy. (If it wasn't, all the shops would be closed.) Typically even when mail-in voting is allowed it is limited to absentees. 5% of votes is a typical figure not 50%.
The problem with early voting is that voters are voting before they have full information. Campaigns inform voters, debates, flyers etc. Many, many, elections have been decided in the last week as some new information comes to light.
I agree that a result on the night was unlikely and that Trump should have joined the efforts to tell people that. That didn't effect the result though.
No, I don't. Because it's the exact same thing I get every time I engage someone about the problems on the right. Throw it out there if you want, but what's the point when I already agree with you? What's the point when what we're arguing about is the supposed *lack* of extremism on the right, not the presence of it on the left.
I suppose it's fair to say I opened things up at the end to discussing which side is worse. Ok, reasonable people disagree on that. My original intent was to counter your claim that there was no extremism on the right, so it seemed natural to point out that the right was arguably worse. If you want to argue that point, then by all means, talk about Kenosha and Portland. But I'm stunned that you see this as an entirely one-sided affair.
Back in the 80's and 90's we were all focused on the right because they were the primary problem.
Today, we look at the left because they are the primary problem and the greater threat.
Maybe that will change again, but TODAY, here and NOW, the problem is that extreme left, its growing influence and its tendency towards authoritarianism and intolerance. That so many of our institutions are being eaten alive by it from the inside is our greatest challenge.
Right NOW we need to break the hold and influence of the hard left and find some way to empower the old liberal minded center left. Sorta like how we had to break the Freedom Caucus to get some semblance of normality on the right.
And Trump was never on the right. He is his own unique beast, detested as much by the far right as the left. If people loved him it was for the simple fact that he did not give a shit about what the DC establishment or the donors thought and he was willing to stick his finger in their eyes.
You think Trump is detested by the far right? You and I must have a different definition of the "far right". I can tell you that we have a growing right-wing militia problem in this country. We had one in the 1990's (there were also some left-wing militias at the time) but the crackdown after the Oklahoma City bombings sent it scattering.
It reconstituted itself in 2008 with the election of Obama. It has been growing ever since - and those people *love* Trump. The movement is infused with "Christian" nationalism in a perverse way where Trump has become a messianic figure. Trump already has the overwhelming support of American evangelicals, and pastors who oppose him are getting shoved aside and leaving their churches.
Now, you can quibble with whether Trump deserves to be called "right". Certainly plenty of conservatives will tell you he's nothing like the "conservatism" that they've always lived with. Most political scientists certainly feel the term "right-wing" applies. But all of this is just arguing over the definitions of words.
Whatever Trump represents, it has taken over the Republican party. A majority of Republicans, around two thirds in most polls, firmly believe that the 2020 election was stolen. And it has taken a particularly terrifying hold in Evangelical circles. We all saw Trump agitate for the rally that day on social media - what we didn't see were the advertisements and flyers that went out to evangelical parishes at the behest of Trump-supporting pastors giving Trump's claims the imprimatur of Evangelical leaders.
Evangelicals have long represented a sort of hidden sub-culture in America. Before losing the battle against the teaching of evolution in schools, they were very politically active. Afterward, they withdrew from politics and homeschooled their kids. They lived in a bubble where members were encouraged not to watch mainstream television or listen to mainstream music. This made them sort of a soft cult - not powerful enough to prevent escape but strong enough to effectively create a sort of alternate reality where fundamentalist beliefs could thrive. When they got back into politics in the late 20th century, they became an essential component of the Republican base, making a sort of strange coalition with libertarians and fiscal conservatives.
This ended up creating an odd kind of fusion political/religious identity in which being Evangelical meant supporting fiscal conservatism and Republican candidates for office (something previous Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham had hoped to avoid). With the arrival of Trump, the marriage of the different components of the Republican party began to weaken, and many traditional Republicans ended up distancing themselves or leaving the party; others have rationalized Trump or seem content to wait him out. Perhaps you are part of this latter group.
Regardless, what we have at the end is a solid core of Trump worshippers and an outer rind of more traditional Republicans willing to keep their heads down and hope he goes away. I have even read recently that there are a significant number of people who identify as Evangelical but never attend church. Apparently this is different than the traditional "convenient Catholic". These are people who are only weakly religious but identify as Evangelical primarily because it has become almost synonymous with this new kind of Republican - nationalistic, militant, mostly white, working class, and with a passionate hatred of liberals and Democrats. A subgroup of it has now been mixed up with Q-Anon craziness to create this perverse pseudo-Christian "theology" (not that it's terribly well defined) centered around Trump that is perhaps the most dangerously deranged. But overall the party base is owned by Trump.
So if you think right NOW you can just focus on the left and ignore the right, I have bad news for you. The left may control cultural institutions, but the right still controls most of the political machinery in this country and are poised to restore it through both legal and extra-legal means - and they have the backing of a substrata of heavily armed and severely delusional people whom we got a short glimpse of on January 6th. And they're talking revolution and civil war.
Of course, we won't get anything like the American Civil War of the 19th century. There won't be two sides lining up in a field - that would be a massacre for the vigilantes. It will be scattered and decentralized, more resembling the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the late 20th century. Unless we do something to stop it. Until then, people who see this are going to keep voting Democrat, and the left-wing narratives about white supremacy are only going to seem more and more reasonable.
Every team thinks that. Woke lefties think they're defending themselves and marginalized communities from right-wing aggression. Even the KKK thought they were "defending" white America from uppity black threats.
I don't think it's that simple. I think both sides are attacking and see it as justified in defense against the other side.
I am a moderate progressive. I could go on for some time about what I have seen as right-wing aggression since the mid-1990s. I imagine you could do the same with the left. To some extent I understand, even more than I once did. We are smug and self-righteous, and while I once pushed back on such accusations, I have always hated the way we overused claims of racism and sexism. Charges of homophobia were far more justified, thought now that we've largely put that behind us, we have the new cause du jour of transphobia and along with it the most fanatical activists I've ever seen on the left. And now it's to the point where we have a tendency to criticize *everything* through the lens of X-ism or X-phobia (like the progressive response to Lori Lightfoot's criticism of the Chicago Teacher's Union) as if the only way something can be bad is if it affects someone other than white males. So yes, I get why people on the right feel like they're being attacked.
But don't forget that when these culture wars began, the right actually had the upper hand in terms of public opinion. As that began to shift, and the left began amassing cultural power, Republicans were amassing power at the state level. Smart politics yes, but not necessarily healthy when you look at the undemocratic ways in which they've tried to tilt the playing field to avoid having to grow their base, and in this way rule from the minority (severe gerrymandering, restrictive voting laws, years of frivolous and baseless accusations of voter fraud, Republican state legislatures stripping executive powers from incoming Democratic governors, etc.).
This all culminated with Trump and his shameless ploy to maintain power despite losing the election, and a party base becoming increasingly obsessed with guns, receptive to wild conspiracy theories, and comfortable with apocalyptic talk of preserving their civilization through militant force.
So progressives have infected our cultural institutions with their illiberalism and McCarthy-esque trashing of our public discourse, and the right has developed a dangerously militant authoritarian streak which now has the imprimatur of the Republican establishment. We will not succeed in opposing one of these in isolation, because they both feed off one another. They must be attacked in tandem.
I'll keep my eye out for articles and I will look for your book.
Best of luck to you.
I am so grateful for substack.
I refuse to buy any of the major papers here in the US even when the Wapo and NYT are offering me deals for a $1 a month. Useless rags. I do not have cable because I find the news on CNN, MSNBC, FOX and the major networks to be no better than cheap propaganda.
YET....I pay over $200 a year for substack subscriptions for only 4 authors because they are worth reading.
Sadly I would add the WSJ to your list of useless rags. I hold my subscription there for the editorials only, even as the front page "news" becomes increasingly irrelevant.
Thanks to above posters for pointing out the loss of The Economist and the WSJ. With regards to the latter, it has also become very poorly written, almost embarrassing at times. If those are the best young writers the Ivy League can turn out, they are pathetic, indeed
Wrong - it’s the NYTIMES that’s off the rails. Cancelled that a few years ago when it was obviously woke’. the WSJ is about the only paper reporting the news.
Tara, congratulations on waking up, but I think it's a little disingenuous to blame this on radicalism that emerged from ivy league schools.
This tyranny we're all experiencing started with progressives, specifically progressive journalists and influencers.
Basically, when anyone questioned the progressive worldview, or pushed back against the "diversity" crammed down our throats, we were labeled bigots. That bullying was very effective, and the snowball that followed was the inevitable end result.
I agree. The assertion that this all came out of nowhere over a period of about 18 months is absurd. Most of these stunning and brave "new MSM" warriors (for example, I would exclude Greenwald from my critique) only started bolting when the bell started ringing for them and the grass looked greener on the other side. Prior to that, they were more than happy to nurture, support, celebrate and suckle the beast that sustained them, until it inevitably turned on them.
"This tyranny we're all experiencing started with progressives, specifically progressive journalists and influencers."
The thing is, where do you think they all went to school and got their journalism degrees? Batya Ungar-Sargon talks about that, about how one begot the other.
I think they do that because revolutions work really well as a disguise. This is why you have so many "feminists" who only love feminism when it gives them a chance to knock over someone who's thinner and prettier than they are, and why so many Republican family-values politicians get caught trying to cadge sex out of guys in men's rooms. A movement is a great place to hide if you're exactly the opposite of what it says it's about. It's an ideological version of regulatory capture.
Dave, I’ll weigh in a little differently. While I agree with some criticism of the journalists who walk away from their prior LEFT side bastions, I’m not inclined to punish my new allies. They are coming over - maybe not en-mass yet but enough for Bari to acknowledge with a “welcome to the new mainstream”.
Besides that, I see the real seed of most of this as the Universities, and they’re taking very little blame or corrective actions. The media “elites” drank too much of the Kool-Aid, even if it was with honest intent.
I would ask some of them to truly talk to us and find out why we saw this all so much sooner than they. I’ll be happy to check out Tara’s substack and I have a hunch that I’ll be moved to subscribe, though I agree that I’m not gonna be able to subscribe to much more. That might get solved if some start to congeal into big enough group(s) to convince me to cancel my WSJ and just come here.
I don't want to punish anyone, and I despise groveling apologies, but it would be nice if people who went too far would at least own it.
Everyone with even the most basic intellectual curiosity understands the dangers of extremism, even if it's well-intentioned.
Also, campus radicalism is decades old, so I don't think there's a direct link, necessarily. I think there is a direct link to the erosion of ethics in journalistic standards, though.
Where do you think those progressive journalists and influencers went to school? Even if they didn't attend Ivy League, they attended schools that emulated Ivy League.
I am no longer surprised when lefties wipe the fog from their eyes and 'suddenly' realize that they didn't know what were the repercussions of their befuddled world-view. Painting the dystopias of every Marxist state as mis-applied Marxism, they plow on into Marx lite, never having read Marx or Lenin, at least not critically. A world view that excludes God Is a world view that proceeds without light. It attempts to describe what it will not see.
And, the answer is, yes, I have read Marx, and found his ranting preposterous.
"People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship.
Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable."
Except the political atheist ideological regimes of the 20th century killed over 100,000,000 people. No religion for the entire history of humanity can compete with that record.
Harris essentially equated religion with political ideology in order to erase this radical distinction. It is harder to hate on religion when compared to body count of atheist regimes.
People have never become too reasonable. All people everywhere in all times have been driven by emotion, and have thus rejected “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” James 1:27 KJV
“Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as “brainstorm” and “lame.””
——————————————————-
Brainstorm? Really?
This reminds me of a road trip to Calgary when my buddy in the back, who definitely did not have vodka mixed in the Tropicana he was drinking, sudden said
“What the f***???”
That is when we realized we were driving near the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Fort Macleod, AB called
‘Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump’
I feel like they should have canceled that one before they got to ‘brainstorm’, no?
“The buffalo jump was used for 5,500 years by the indigenous peoples of the plains to kill bison by driving them off the 11 metre (36 foot) high cliff.”
Obviously, it’s indigenous so it really cannot be offensive because of diversity and stuff, even though it was fairly shocking to a car full of frat guys who then spent the next two hours coming up with fake names for Canadian towns we drove through like ‘Blunt-Force-To-Groin Tractorsville’.
It’s all about pandering to black Progressives. They are anti-brain about everything; Get rid of test scores (so you can’t see how bad blacks are doing); Competition of any sort is bad (because blacks don’t fare well); insist on quotas to the detriment of all other races (because that’s the only way blacks can get in anywhere); and just keep pandering to the black community. That’s precisely what Joe Biden did in his Atlanta speech yesterday in front of a black audience- he accused at least half or more of the country of being ‘racist’ if they didn’t pass his voting bill. This is coercion at the highest level. Rather despicable that.
I recall watching, in the mid 90s, a young white liberal woman lamenting the plight of homosexuals and black people as if they were a single category.
The response from fellow, and black, student was pretty revealing.
Short version was stfu and get off "our side." The young man had very definite ideas about this phenomenon. Though this observation is anecdotal it may have merit, the majority of those white progressives I witnessed advocating (unasked) on behalf of black people were very well educated women from well heeled families. About as remote from the object of their concern as could be. Although not squarely analogous it still reminds me of what Dickens called telescopic philanthropy, plus, I really love the term so I'm gonna use it. 😉
In my experience this is more what white progressives advocate for on behalf of black people rather than what black people themselves are advocating for. Similar to luxury beliefs like "defund the police." You find me one inner city black person who agrees with that sentiment.
I dont think its black progs at all. Most black people are either apolitical, inactive politically, tied to the local community or church and the issues there, or...media stars and profs like Joy Reid, Ibrahim X Kendi, who survive not on black prog money, but on white prog money. Black progressives are not all that different from the white Karen's on your school board, and the ballerina bun wearing Brooklyn beta boys in skinny jeans who still think Hillary lost cuz of Putin.
I wish Tara well, but the Substack big hitters already cover this ground pretty thoroughly.
I suggest a narrow focus on calling out particular Canadian insanity, which is almost invisible to Americans, so thoroughly is it censored in American MSM--perhaps that is already planned. Canadian Wokeism has a particularly and nauseatingly sanctimonious stench--a bunch of tight-assed white people lecturing America about its many failings...
"The story of Tara Henley is the story of countless liberals. Until recently, they were the ones pushing everyone else to be more tolerant, more understanding, more open-minded, more compassionate."
WHAT?? When, exactly? When was the "story of countless liberals" one of "pushing everyone else to be more tolerant, more understanding, more open-minded, more compassionate"?
Please provide examples. Show your work.
Tolerant of Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin? Tolerant of JK Rowling and Martina Navratilova? Tolerant of PA Governor Casey (no, I'm talking about the pro-life Casey, the elder Casey)? Tolerant of the Colorado caterer? Tolerant of Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson and Condoleezza Rice?
My God, the list is endless. I'm just getting started.
Cancel culture ideology is NOT a recent phenomenon; it's been the modus operandi of the Left everywhere, and of the Democrat Party in America, for YEARS.
PUH-leeze do NOT insult our intelligence or our memories with such claptrap as "Liberals have always been the compassionate and tolerant and open-minded and understanding ones". Good grief.
Having said that, it's only fair that I also say that I like Tara's column and I wish her well. I'll be subscribing, because IMO the alphabet legacy media need to be burned to the ground and the earth salted where they stood, and indy journos need to be supported regardless of whether their politics dovetail with mine. I'm guessing hers don't, which is even more reason to subscribe, IMO. I don't want echo chambers.
It's funny you mention JK Rowling; lefties LOVED her back when conservatives were trying to get her books banned for "promoting witchcraft". Then one day she uttered some opinons that were deemed wrongthink (despite still being a very mainstream opinion), and she became public enemy #1.
The days when a person like JK Rowling was still welcome in the progressive club are the good old days of promoting tolerance/compassion that Bari & Tara are talking about.
"The days when a person like JK Rowling was still welcome in the progressive club are the good old days of promoting tolerance/compassion that Bari & Tara are talking about."
And when were those good old days? Bari & Tara suggest that it was "recently". I suggest it was, if it was *ever*, it was decades ago. Remember, pro-Life Gov. Robert Casey (D-PA) was UNinvited to the ... 1992 Democrat National Convention *because* of his pro-life views (notwithstanding the media's efforts to change the narrative).
In 1991 we all know what the Left did to Clarence Thomas during his confirmation process.
That's at least three decades of the Left's lack of tolerance, understanding, compassion, and open-mindedness, a far cry from "until recently".
I'd say that this new strain of woke intolerance started creeping through issue by issue around 15-20 years ago (starting with "islamophobia"). It then spread issue-by-issue, until now it's consumed more or less all of left-wing politics. Different people are invested in different issues, so the woke movement "came for them" at different times in that slow-creeping hostile takeover. Maybe for Bari Weiss it was Israel and the BDS movement, who knows.
I wouldn't start the clock based on the abortion issue, just because of how much of a 2-way street that issue is. I still remember when Tomi Lahren got canceled on the right for coming out as pro-choice. Pro-life Democrats have always been roughly as popular as pro-choice Republicans.
Popularity may be similar, but in 1996 pro-choice NY congressman Susan Molinari not only spoke at the GOP National Convention, she gave the keynote speech.
So, vis-a-vis abortion apostates, the Left and the Right are not similar.
Also, I didn't start the clock on abortion per se. The Casey and Thomas episodes happened at the same time, and the Thomas one was about far more than abortion.
Ditto my mention of Martina Navratilova. She was a darling of the Left until she expressed skepticism or criticism of the trans movement in women's sports (I think that was the issue). Then, she became the Worst Person on Earth to the Left.
So yeah, it's not just those on the Right for whom the Left has ALWAYS had contempt and intolerance. It's also for anyone on the Left who dares deviate even one iota from Leftist dogma.
You Will Comply, Or Else! is the Left's and the Democrat Party's sole animating principle.
It wasn't always that way - there used to be such thing as "big tent" liberalism.
Now, the Democrats don't know WTF to do about the fact their progressive white base has swung way to the left, while their (larger) minority base stayed moderate. The party is slowly being ripped in half.
Not "always", but my point is that it most definitely wasn't "recently", as Bari stated ("until recently"), that you have to go back decades to see evidence of big tent liberalism.
Woke white people only swung out to the left of minorities on racial issues in the last 6-7 years. Defund the Police would have been unthinkable in 2014.
Books are wonderful. Mark Twain said, “The man who doesn’t read has no advantage over the man who can’t read”
As a believer my supposition is that we are made to worship, something. This new ideology is a very strict, very severe, religion. Puritans would blush at its draconian edicts. I’ll pass on it and stay with Christianity, a much more merciful, and grace oriented system
As better thinkers than I have pointed out, for a religion to have any meaning, there must be the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. Wokeism offers neither--it is just Sadism by another name
Good for Ms. Henley. My observation, as a news consumer outside the newsroom, is that it took the insiders who have become shocked by the shift to “wokeness” at CBC, NYT, PBS, NPR, WaPo, McClatchy, etc., so long to catch on to what was happening to their profession. If this shift wasn’t evident before the 2016 election, it should’ve become obvious then, as the media - led by the Times - continued to push the farcical, subversive narrative of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia. The same shift has been underway for years with the media peddling irrational panic about climate change.
I’m grateful that reporters such as Bari Weiss, Nellie Bowles, and Tara Henley have seen the light, and are reflecting it back onto their once-respected profession. They join others who awoke before, such as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Tracey. Better late than never.
This line up top speaks volumes: "a parody of the student press." Newsrooms increasingly occupied by those under 30, fresh out of Columbia J-school where they learned about media from a prof with pronouns.
I want to feel sympathy for Ms. Henley but this is not a phenomenon that sprung Athena-like in the past 18 months.
This has been brewing at least as long as the mid 90s when I was chastised for using the term, “ladies,” and holding the elevator or other door for people who menstruate. I was borish and crude for such patriarchal vulgarities.
It only got worse from there.
I say I want to feel sympathy because I do. But part of me thinks that Ms. Henley is reaping what she and those like her have sewn for the last 30 years.
This is the world you demanded. Now you complain that you got what you asked for.
Were you really that obscenely blind?
Do us all a favor and work hard to fix what so many of us struggled against for decades… not 18 stupid months.
I've never been fond of slippery slope arguments, because almost everything can become dangerous when taken to an extreme.
One of the main precepts of Common Sense, as far as I can tell, is the idea that people can and should be able to disagree, including on issues of real significance, without demonizing or attempting to silence the other. The toxicity of the modern progressive left is that it is narrowing the range of acceptable thought to such an absurd degree that mainstream opinions, including those held in some cases by a solid majority of Americans, are increasingly treated as thought-crime that must be suppressed. That doesn't mean that everyone who ever supported--and may well still support--affirmative action or diversity initiatives or criminal justice reform reform is just reaping what they've sown, any more than people who express conservative sentiments or support conservative policies are responsible for the worst excesses of the Republican party.
"It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like." Wow, that's it in a nutshell.
Democrats don’t like corporations such as Pfizer…..unless they are using force and compulsion. Then they get excited.
It’s almost like they are mainly interested in force and compulsion.
The Left is all about power-for-power’s-sake. That’s it.
CC, Do us all a favor and read the article....You'll find that you agree with most of it. Please grow up or go away. From an ancient conservative with a capital R.
Did I say I disagreed with the article? Perhaps you should read more carefully?!
No, you ignored it and gave a childish response that is not going to open civil dialog with anyone. How is your response productive on a site trying to build bridges?
Kevin........That's a purely junior high post. Don't you get that she's fed up with the BS on the far left too? Your comment doesn't fit here where there is decorum and intelligence. Please grow up and have an ounce of comprehension.
Yeah it should have been clear that I was *agreeing* with her point that the left is now less adversarial to corporations and I was making a secondary point about why they are so pro-Pfizer in this particular case.
I never make junior high posts. That’s ridiculous. You are being a poppy pants and your backpack is old and unfashionable.
Then I apologize without name calling back atcha. It's above you.
Okay but you understand the ‘poopy pants’ was part of a joke where I claim to be mature and then immediately contradict myself, yes?
😂😂
Says the Grand Poobah of Commentary : )
In essence, identity is a disguise through which a class warfare camouflages itself.
This, right here.
Now that right there is a book and it only took 1 sentence. Perfect dd
What day late and a dollar short kind of observation from Ms. Henley.
Yes, the PC crowd has met the enemy and it is them.
"...to actively book more people of some races and less of others."
A corporation is a faceless entity. Attacking a corporation does not feel satisfying because you cannot see who you are hurting and how they are flinching. Attacking individuals is a lot more fun and more self-satisfying because by attacking 1 on 1 you are now on a more level playing field. You can feel your own superiority and witness how you affect your target.
Kind of twisted?
I agree with Ms. Henley that we need to be in the bigger conversation and not about identity.
This is important precisely because the Anglosphere has always been the well spring of freedom and liberal society and is now backsliding into an Orwellian nightmare. It is important to all because it can end in one of three ways 1) the same Orwellian nightmare to which it is spiraling 2) a violent spasm and orgy of rage by the deplorables who will rise up to sweep the self-proclaimed elites and their acolytes from power and confiscate their ill-gotten gains or 3) a return to sanity and cleansing of the woke madness. Right now I prefer option 3 but inch toward option 2 with each new offense by lunatic left.
I am thinking that option 2 was the first Trump presidency and the more time passes the more convinced I am that there WILL be a second one.
I remember Michael Moore saying that the Trump election was the biggest "F You" ever to the establishments of both parties and I still believe he was right.
A second Trump presidency will be a big "FU" to the progressive left and a reaction to the Biden presidency.
Saw yesterday that the betting odds of Trump winning another term are now 3-1 in his favor and Biden is at 9-2 against him. It was the complete opposite last Feb.
The question is: How will the progressive left respond to being told off?
My guess? The response will be dramatic and probably violent. That group is populated by Woke religious fanatics and a lot of life's dead enders with nothing to lose. These are the people of instant gratification, participation trophies and helicopter parents. They do not accept that they do not get what they want.
I don't necessarily like Trump. But damn, he did know how to do the job!
hat is why he had to go . Who ever heard of a politician that does what they said they would do once elected . Just crazy
But what did he actually do?
I can't stand Trump, but even I can admit he brought a more realistic approach to border security, China, and he did good work with the Abraham Accords and trying to reverse the trend of jobs being outsourced overseas to take advantage of cheap labour.
I liked that he stood up to China. I'm from the rust belt.
He also did this: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/04/politics/donald-trump-great-american-outdoors-act/index.html
and this: https://apnews.com/article/bills-donald-trump-politics-c4834e48841d97c5a93312b1bf75302a
He also kept us out of new wars.
I am one of the rare liberals I know that can look at the man's actions with clear eyes. Pretty much everyone else I know has severe TDS. My husband's mom starts screaming if I even mention his name.
Nothing that would remotely register or be even slightly visible to a prog blinded by the orange fog machine. I'm sorry, I can't help you.
They won’t let Trump win again. They will send the military to enforce election “safety/freedom” because, they will say, the elections are being run by dozens of Bull Connor figures in various swing states. That plus Zuckerberg will spend $2 billion this time.
It will be pitched as the equivalent of Eisenhower sending the 101st Airborne to ensure the Little Rock Nine could attend desegregated schools.
They will not let him win again.
I hope your wrong. Because if your right, there will be an armed insurrection this time.
I'm also not all that sure that the government could count on the military at this point. Just not. And I work with the military every day.
Yes, they have been purging people from the armed forces they think are extremists but I really do not think you could get the army or marines to step up like that reliably anymore.
Wrung...plus, when we pull a jail break "they'll be on our side, this time".
Don't bet on that. Human nature is funny. All it takes is one thing to ignite the spark. Was a tax on tea really what sent a swarm of patriots, mad as hornets, to the road from Concord to Boston? There is a well spring of rising anger and playing with armed patriots is playing with fire. And progressives are just dumb enough to strike that match.
So true. Very dangerous to continually harass and attack groups of people. You can push them too far
Class...a little time in the hovel jail cell could move things forward, builds "stomach".
But this next time there will be pushback. And even the Dept of Injustice will not be able to gaslight their way out of it. Could they really jail millions?
That's why the DOJ got busy creating a "Domestic Terrorism Force" as of last week. Gotta put a match to that gaslight at this point. It won't take millions. Just the "trumped up," abject and very celebrated humiliation and destruction of specifically chosen figures on the front lines. I'll bet they already have a list.
I'll bet some of us are on it already. Are you frightened of them? I am not.
There is controlling money behind that movement. The hands which deliver the money provide the steering. Go read up on Open Society. It all sounds so innocuous, but the goal is global governance.
how will they react ?? protests and impeachments starting 3 months before he gets elected .
They are trying to pre-impeach him with that nonsense January 6th committee right now. Incredible resources and time spent trying to bring him down over and over again by the usual suspects for six years now.
Not so sure about those odds. I think they'll change if Trump's recorded demand to 'find' roughly 12000 votes to Georgia's Republican Secretary of State after the election is prosecuted by the Atlanta District Attorney. It might be difficult to win even his party's nomination if your man is being charged by the State of Georgia with vote tampering. Though, since the Republicans have become a party committed to the cult worship of one man, anything is possible. So I could be wrong.
1. He is not "my guy"
2. If he were going to be charged with anything it would have happened. The best shot of that was going to be if the Jan 6 Committee had been truly bipartisan and had found a smoking gun and if that was gonna happen it would have already. Plus..
a) 76% of those recently polled did not think the events rose to an insurrection but were a mob that got out of control and rioted.
b) It is not even in the top 10 of concerns among all voters and not in the top 6 for democrats.
c) The committee is likely to be disbanded as soon as the republicans take the house in the fall.
3. Those are betting odds as of yesterday, not my opinion or anyone elses individual opinion but the collected opinion of people who put money down on bets. You can make of that what you will but my experience is that people who take bets and those who make them collectively seem to generally be close to the mark. Just a data point.
We could spend all day on various theories and speculations as to why things are as they are and what is or is not likely to happen but it is not a stretch to say that there is a general consensus that the democrats have very very badly messed up on a lot of fronts and are very likely to pay a very steep price next year. What happens after....who knows but it is not unreasonable to presume that things are not going to get better for the democrats going from Jan 2023 on.
A WHOLE lot could happen between then and the start of the next presidential election. Biden could drop dead of old age. Trump could drop dead. Trump could decide not to run and back the FL governor, be a king maker rather than a king so he does not have to deal with the media or the democrats and can keep making money. Biden could decide not to run and the democrats actually find a candidate that will manage to overcome the hole that the progressives and Biden have dug.
One thing I think IS safe to say....the progressive political agenda is dead for at least a decade.
Dead Enders, life’s flotsam and jetsam
I have no time for a well-considered answer right now, as I have to go to work, but I cannot just let these "labels" pass without comment. I apparently am a deplorable, having been a life-long dem who voted for Trump. I do not support an "orgy of rage" just now, although our current administration in the US. certainly deserves it.
I am also a life-long dem who voted for Trump - FU vote. I'm from the rust belt. Michael Moore was right.
I feel the same way. But….
In America I could foresee a national divorce.
It is plausible for TX to FL to form a new nation.
I believe that could happen if, for example, SCOTUS gets packed after the senate filibuster is gone.
Like an option 4.
If you support option 2 you are a Bolshevik. You've lost faith in democracy and the belief in debate and compromise. (By the way does this include the Trump family's "ill-gotten gains"?) You've lost faith in the idea of an open pluralistic society and you've decided that authoritarianism is the answer.
My advice? Learn to live with the fact that there are LGBTQ people in the world, and they deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Learn to recognize that there really is such a thing as White privilege and support efforts to help the less privileged catch up (i.e., more spending on education and job training). Rather than using violence to even things out, start voting to tax the rich to help the poor and working class of all races and and gender identities.
You say you support option 3, but what does that look like? LGBTQ folks go back in the closet? We go back to ignoring the myriad ways that Black people have been systematically disadvantaged?
WOW....Just WOW Matt. That is WAY WAY over the top.
Let me lay some things out for you.
1. Most of us out here just do NOT give a rats ass about LGBTQ ..XYZ. Just not even in out thoughts good or bad. We are mostly, completely and utterly indifferent. Ya aint special in any way shape or form. Your either an asshole or your not. You either do your job or you do not. Your a good neighbor or you are not. Are there people out there who do care? Sure. But they are an annoying minority that we basically put in the same class as the melodramatic farts that write comments like yours that assume we care at all.
2. Pretty sure you meant reactionary Fascist instead of Bolshevik....but I'm guessing you do not read a lot of history.
3. We only want you in a closet if your an annoying pain in the ass whose sanctimonious celebration of victim hood is getting on our nerves.
4. There is a reasonable argument to be made that over the last 40 yrs Black people have ACTUALLY been systematically ADVANTAGED. Certainly government setasides for Black owned business is a structural advantage. Certainly affirmative action and systems to enforce diversity over merit are structural advantages. Honestly, being really truly honest, if domestically born black people are failing today it is because of pathologies in their culture. African immigrants, ACTUAL AFRICAN IMMIGRANTS, not African-Americans ( a term BTW that annoys a lot of Africans ) are doing better by far than most ethnic groups. Nigerians in particular, with Ganan's right on their heals, are doing really well and beat all other ethnic groups, including White people, in terms of education and wealth growth. Indian immigrants, many of whom are far more black than most Black Americans, are ALSO doing exceptionally well in terms of education and climbing the economic ladder. SO...it aint the skin tone dude, its the attitude. But you wallow in that, you sit and whine and complain while the rest of these groups charge ahead. BTW....after domestically born Black people, the group that most supports black issues is White people. Hispanics, Asians and new African immigrants have the least amount of sympathy for Black Americans issues and in fact are more likely than White people to oppose special preferences. So suck it up, put on your big boy pants and get to work. Quit whining and thinking your special
Thank you for your take down and spanking of our poster boy for progressive lunacy. Saved me the effort.
thanks , well said wish i had the patience to type that
You probably don't realize it, but 1 and 3 are in conflict. If you think people who have preferred pronouns that don't fit within your narrow definition of gender identity are pains in the asses, if you want them back in the closet, then you DO give a rats ass. You are, in fact, very angry about the issue.
On 4) The median household wealth of White families is $180,000. The median household wealth of Black families is $18,000. That's a lot of White privilege. There are reasons for this discrepancy that are related to generations of systematic abuse and disadvantage. (Slavery, Jim Crow, red-lining, reduced employment opportunities, poorly-funded schools, over policing, racist sentencing guidelines, etc.) You simply don't want to admit that this is the case. Probably because you assume that mitigating those disadvantages would some how mean taking things away from you, or from White people. But that is not the case. Read Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us. Also, this should be obvious but Immigrants did not experience those systematic disadvantages, so they did not grow up with generationally transferred social pathologies. (One of these pathologies is a learned sense of hopelessness about the future.)
The big problem with CRT/Antiracism is that it ENCOURAGES the pathology of helplessness. It teaches black youth that systemic racism is like a malevolent god; omnipresent, all-powerful, and determined to make their lives miserable.
No point studying for the SAT; it was "created to flunk black students". No point trying to get a job; capitalism was "invented to oppress black people". Nothing those poor black folk can do but sit around and wait for some White Saviors to rescue them.
Think the same thing. Your handicapping them before they ever get started.
Life is hard and it is not fair. Not for anyone and not in equal amounts.
I tell that to my kids all the time for two reasons. First, be grateful for what you have. Second, do not take if for granted and be prepared to work hard to just keep it. Nobody is going to come save you. You better be strong enough and equip yourself with the tools to take care of yourself.
I also tell them that it is perfectly possible to do all the right things and still fail. You can either whine about it and wallow in your misery or get off your ass and try again. THAT I have drummed in their heads since they were little. Eventually, if you do the right things over and over, despite any setbacks, you will get to where you want or need to go.
^^^This!
Nonsense. Do you think Ibram X Kendi feels helpless? Do you think he tells his audiences that they are helpless? On the contrary.
I think Kendi feels like he's discovered the perfect cash cow; getting paid $20,000 per hour to tell his audiences they are helpless unless democracy is ended and replaced with a woke junta.
I think he is a huxter who has figured out how to make a bunch of money spewing nonsense. He found a market and wrote intellectually weak philosophy to fill it.
The guy is no better than any other self help guru with a story to tell.
He is getting rich and laid on a foundation of the unearned guilt of White upper middle class women.
Do you seriously think that the words has the meaning (and the effect) according Webster? You are explaining the person that he is “oppressed” and this is the reason of his poor life position. In what way the person is expected to react? First, he is trying “to stop oppression”, right? He can require, he can demand, but the final solution depends on the oppressor. The oppressor can agree that he is a bad guy and stop oppression – and can disagree with this and go on oppression. So, the person is facing the dilemma – to resort to violence (at least some kind of violence), or agree that his faith depends on others (on the will of the oppressor).
Nice dilemma, hah? I can agree? though, that logic is not a strong feature of a mob of "appressed", and demagogues are not usually appealing to the reasoning.
OMG....how can you be SO far off?
What you are essentially saying is that the median White family has an income that puts them in the top 5% of income earners. That is just impossible. MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.
Tell ya what, you come to DC sometime and you will see PLENTY of wealthy Black people running around.
SO...we agree then, there are social pathologies at work in the domestically born Black community. They are UNIQUE to the domestically born Black community. And really, we are talking about the URBAN domestically born Black community.
Well dude, nothing the government or any special conditions offered is gonna change that. That is internal and it gets reinforced from parent to child, handed down like a family heirloom. There is NOTHING that is going to change that until they choose to change it themselves. There is very very little if any real systemic issues apart from attitude and inter-generational poverty keeping these people back.
AND....you just might want to ask yourself why it is that Black people in the US had higher rates of education and higher rates of business and home ownership BEFORE the 1960's. Ya know, back in the day when 80% of black children were born into two parent households before the term "baby mama" became part of the social lexicon.
Careful - he's talking net worth not annual income.
But he said "income"
Very incomplete thinking, Matt. Yes, black Americans have had to overcome the institution and residues of slavery, but to blame wealth discrepancies on "white privilege", then say immigrants are immune to white privilege is nonsensical. if I'm walking down the street, do you think if I can tell (or care) if a black person is from Belize, Benin or the Bronx? Those "inauthentic" black immigrants simply bring more of those "white privilege" values such as working hard, saving more and delaying gratification, a higher willingness to participate in employer-sponsored retirement plans, a higher rate of intact (2 parent) families and yes - better K-12 education in many poorer countries than our inner city public schools offer. These are all attributes that the African American community enjoyed in the post world war II era. The Voting Rights Act was a crowning achievement, but the Great Society and the entitlement culture that followed hollowed out the well-being and overall health of many American families and communities, probably none more so than the inner city African American community. Many African Americans dodged that bullet - 12% of the middle class is Black, and they are 13% of the U.S. population, i.e. they have the same proportional representation that whites and Hispanics do. But, sadly, many have not, and we have work to do to eradicate the New Plantation, where the new Master is the government, that doles out a dependency-generating stipend and offers below 3rd world education and criminal domination of neighborhoods, all the while maintaining compliance with the narrative that "racism" is holding them back. Liberals destroyed the lives of millions in order to "help" them, and now they want to blame their failures on conservatives who are suddenly all racist. Nice try. It doesn't even fly in the African American community any more. They know they've been had.
I've heard all of those arguments. The idea that the government is ruining people's lives by doling out "dependency-generating stipends" is simply not true. Have you looked at what happens when people receive universal basic income? It tends to make their lives better and more manageable.
And generations of systemic deprivation and abuse leads to social pathologies that pass on from generation to generation. Immigrants arrive without those generational burdens.
Maybe we agree that we need to dramatically improve the quality of our educational system. Of course that will require more funding, which is probably where we would part ways again.
You are in a catch 22.
You cannot correct for those pathologies by enabling them.
Matt, I will grant you that those pathologies were in no small part created in response to racial disparities. Not going to argue that.
What I will argue is the following...
1. The sins of the father do NOT fall on the son. We do not want to go there if for no other reason than that no group or race has its hands clean if your willing to go back and look. None of us of any color would be clean.
2. There is nothing that we, today, can do to amend the hurt done in the past to people who are gone. For those alive today who lived under Jim Crowe? For them we could probably do something and perhaps should. What exactly I am not sure, but something to support them would not be out of line.
3. For this generation? We cannot fix the pathologies in their community. We do not have the power. I cannot imagine anyone I know, had they a magic wand to wave and make it all better who would not do so. But the problems are such that only they can fix them. We cannot parent their children. We cannot force them to stop having babies they cannot afford out of wedlock. We cannot make black men stick around to father children and even if we could many of them never had fathers themselves so they have no idea what that means or how to do it. We cannot get rid of drugs. God knows we have tried. We cannot simply stop them from killing each other or getting into gangs or committing crimes. Those things are all personal choices we cannot control. How do we stop them from celebrating Gangsta culture and misogynistic music? God help us if we even tried. We cannot be there to assure their kids do their homework. We MIGHT be able to help parents with no schooling learn how to help their kids but how many of them would take the opportunity. How can we help them when they think that things like attention to detail, hard work, logic are white oppression? How can we help them progress when they insist that speaking proper English is another form of racism?
They need to CHOOSE and then they need to execute. We can support them in some small ways...but really...its out of our power.
Tell ya something else, they better get that together before Whites are no longer the majority because once that ends its gonna be really hard to convince a culture dominated by successful Latinos and Asians that THEY have a responsibility to fix the problems in the Black community. THEY are gonna have ZERO sympathy.
I'll give you this, Matt - you are a progressive down the line. Where UBI has been tried, the amounts tend to be immaterial, and the post-mortems suggest little constructive or destructive change in behaviors, but that recipients tended to "feel good" about the extra cash. Brilliant. The one exception is Iran, where UBI is substantial. But it is received in exchange for compliance on social and political viewpoints - the real point of UBI.
As for education, there is a LOT of data both domestically and globally. Spoiler alert: there is no correlation between spending and outcomes. Homework assignment: compare the specific spending of a given public school's revenues with that of a private school. Then go audit the classrooms of each for a couple days. Then we'll talk about education and spending.
The ignorance is not an argument, though. Chinese people came to US with the history of thousands years of oppressions, Jews came to US with the history of the hundred years of oppressions, and the history of the racism and oppressions went on in US for a while. Where is "the social pathology"?
You are digging in the wrong direction, Matt. The answer do exist, but you hesitate to see it.
Dear Matt, the difference in results (“the median household wealth of White families is $180,000, the median household wealth of Black families is $18,000”) by itself means NOTHING. It is the wrong idea that everybody should have the same results in “the life race”, or there are “oppression”. The mistake is quite natural, though, under the circumstances that racists used to explain the failure of “black community folks” by genetic reasons; this explanation is apparently wrong.
The reason of “black disaster” is purely and solely common wrong “social attitude” inside the “black community”. Have black people problems in their life? True, they do. Are some of these problems originating from racist attitude toward them? Yes, it is. The issue is that the community as the entire “black community” (but not all of black people!) are focused on the problems and “injustice” instead of finding opportunities and using ‘em.
Jews in Russian Empire (and –let’s tell true – partially in US as well) experienced a severe discrimination in past; nevertheless, now this is one of the most successful communities in Russia and in US as well. Chinese immigrants in US also experienced a severe discrimination and (by the way!) tremendous racist-based pressure (comparable with the ant-black racism) in the second part of 19th and first part of 20th centuries. Now these are one of the most successful “minority communities” in US (having median household wealth over US average. There are many other examples around the globe.
Moreover, there are enough “white households” with the wealth below $18,000. Are they also “oppressed” in some way (as Bolsheviks thought), or are there different “black social patterns” and “white social patterns” (the “racially correct physics and math” are in the offing)?
And by the way, Matt, few, if any of us care with whom you make love, or how. It's frankly boring and tedious. Why does that so obsess you?
Your side of this cultural divide is very angry about the idea of people using pronouns that don't fit within your side's narrow definitions of gender identity. That upsets me, because I know people who are on the receiving end of that anger.
Angry?
More like fed up with straight up obnoxious people who want to foist their annoying foibles on the rest of us while we are dealing with the actually important things in life like raising kids and paying mortgages and living OUR lives.
Do you HONESTLY think most of us give a damn what someone wants to call themselves? Really?
We all have THREE issues with this whole thing....maybe FOUR.
BUT...before I proceed, I will simply say that I DO believe that there are people born with what amounts to as a birth defect in which their internal gender identity does not align with their biological sex. I sure as hell do not believe the numbers we are seeing with this and think to a certain degree, among young people being gender fluid, bi, trans ...whatever has become fashionable. Being gay is passe, so 1980s.
1. STOP trying to tell us that some hormones and surgery are going to convert someone from one sex to another. That crap is done at the DNA level. You can create some sort of Frankenstein person that looks like the other sex but will NEVER BE the other sex. Period.
2. Identifying as something does not make it true. If that were the case then I would identify as a Black Woman and apply to the SBA for a Woman & Minority Owned business certification and double my business. Heck, I would identify as a disabled Eskimo and REALLY get some government business. We do NOT think it smart to allow any boy that claims he is a girl to enter a woman's bathroom or locker room. Why? Are we terrified of "trans people"? NO...We just know that there are asshole, predatory men who are just nuts enough to make that claim for a chance to engage in sexual assaults. Were we RIGHT? Yep and we do not think that the feelings of a trans person trump our daughters, wives and sisters safety. PERIOD. We really just do NOT CARE about what issues you have with gender dysphoria. Not our problem until you make it our problem. NOR do we think it is fair or safe to allow people who transition from male to female to compete in women's sports. Got nothing to do with whether or not they should be allowed to compete in sports but everything to do with fair play and safety and those of us with daughters are determined that there be a fair playing field for them. Just look at the disaster in women's swimming. Now ask us how we would feel about allowing those same trans girls to swim with girls but be ranked against other trans girls in a separate division and I think you would be surprised at how many of us would be absolutely fine with that.
3. Look, you show up looking like a girl...your gonna get girl pronouns. You show up looking like a boy..your gonna get boy pronouns. Your not special. Your not unique and nobody cares about your feelings any more than you care about theirs or they care about anyone else's. Get over it. This sense of having to be special and having to be oversensitive is what annoys people. You mistake anger for frustration of having to deal with additional stupidity in our busy lives because some jackass thinks they deserve special treatment.
Bottom line, trans, gender fluid, WHATEVER.....get this through your head...we are more annoyed by your sense of entitlement, nasty attitudes, hyper sensitivity, the general idea that you think your special cuz of a birth defect, than the fact that you have the birth defect.
And I said birth defect just to annoy you. BUT...logically speaking, if your born with a body that does not align with your brain and it requires surgical intervention....then birth defect might just not be out of line.
careful Matts head is going to explode , truth will short circuit his brain
I'm done pulling punches.
Ya know, the more I think about it the more I think these people do what they do for attention. Its like they have a need to be special in some way and this is a way for them to do it.
Its an issue of self esteem.
But what can you expect from a generation that grew up with participation trophies, being told they are special and unique by their parents and basically molly coddled from birth.
You only get real self esteem from real achievement and that only comes from hard work, being willing to fail and knowing how to get back up anyway.
Nobody is special at everything. Most of us are special only to our families. Not everyone is gonna be Tom Brady or Paveratti. Not everyone is gonna be Elon Musk or Michael Jackson. These people need to learn that there is value in just being a good person, good son or sister, a good member of the community. Just do your best and be decent to other people. But they all want to be social media influencers. They all want to be important on a large stage and they do not want to hear that that requires three things, only one of which they can control.
1. Talent
2. Luck
3. Hard work
Thank you for that spot on retort. And allow me to add, we don't give a fig about what pronouns you care to use on your e-mail. Just stop insisting that the rest of us play along with it.
You're going to insist on everyone else conforming to your understanding of gender identity? How would you feel if society decided to treat you like a woman, and call you a woman?
There are some people who feel that they have really inherited a title of the King, and ask others to refer to them as to "your majesty", if they don't want to upset 'em...
LGBTQ people exist. They are not faking it to gain some advantage, as you seem to be suggesting. And they are frequently bullied and belittled and discriminated against by people who think like you. Then, when they choose to fight back, you call them annoying and say they are acting entitled.
you: "Do you HONESTLY think most of us give a damn what someone wants to call themselves? Really?"
Yes. Obviously you do give a damn. And I think that because I'm reading the words that you wrote.
You are the definition of transphobic.
Now I'm really hurt.
You are a sloppy thinker, Matt. LGBTQ people are not all or even mostly trans. Stop lumping them together. Moreover, try reading what I wrote. I said we don't care what you call yourselves, just stop insisting we play along. Now run along and play. Soon it will be nap time.
Not upset about you using your pronoun of choice. Upset about you requiring us to use your pronoun of choice.
How would you feel if society insisted on using the opposite of your preferred pronoun?
Honestly? I really would not give a shit. Why the hell should I care about what somebody else thinks or what they have to say?
Who are they to me?
The only people whose opinions matter are my friends and my family. Even my family I can blow off cuz some of them are straight up jackasses.
You worry WAY WAY too much about your feelings when you should just toughen the fuck up and blow off shit instead of making it into a big deal. Far more important things in life to worry about.
Your generation never would have survived our youth where sticks and stones was the rule. You go through life thinking that your entitled to never be offended, that other people are responsible for your feelings. Sorry, we all deal with it and YOU are responsible for your own feelings, nobody else. Get over yourself.
You DO realize that by giving other people the ability to impact your feelings, to really get you spun up with words, you are actually empowering them to control you right? Your handing them a lever they can use to piss you off and rattle you and make you act out. Your empowering them and telling them that you are. That is nuts and a recipe for making yourself a victim and miserable.
No problem. There are too many more important things to worry about.
Who exactly was one of the very first voices calling for legalizing gay marriage? Donald Trump. Who was a very good friend of Donald Trump, and a regular shopping buddy to Donald Trump? The very gay—flamboyant in fact—singer Liberace. According to an earlier BariWeiss story, the first Northeastern US golf courses open to Blacks and Jews were the golf courses owned by Donald Trump.
Spit out the Kool-Aid, do your own research, see just how homophobic and racist is this Donald Trump character.
Common Sense does a great job exposing new voices who have freed themselves from old media. However at some point these voices need to band together to create a true competitor to NYT, WaPo, etc. My view is there are too many individual voices on substack who should be working together.
It also gets very expensive very quickly to subscribe to them all individually.
Agreed. I'd love to read quite a few of these things, but after a while it adds up to an enormous amount of money.
Substack needs to start offering a deal where you can subscribe to a certain number of writers for a fee that is more than a single subscription, but less than what you would pay for all of them individually.
Agreed. I keep thinking of Batya Ungar Sargon's thesis that a big part of what's caused journalism to cater only to the loaded is putting every damn thing behind paywalls so that the only clicks they get are from people with the money to spare. If Substack puts every good writer behind a paywall, what's to keep it from getting just as bad faster?
Yes, exactly. As others write below, SubStack needs to adopt a payment system. Look into BAT (Basic Attention Token) as a payment model. Perhaps, I can read the first paragraph of an essay for free, but if I wish to read the entire essay, it costs say 0.2 BAT which is worth about 25 cents US.
I love this idea because I'm not always interested in all of the content on a substack nor do I have time to read everything. This approach would allow me to read more authors.
My resignation letter to my government agency will sound similar to this one.
A beautifully articulate explanation of the times we are currently living in. The best of luck Tara, I have subscribed to your substack and look forward to your work.
There was a bumper sticker in the late 60s that said, “You’re not paranoid. They really are out to get you!” My friends and I laughed. We are not laughing anymore. I absolutely agree with Tara’s observation that this phenomena began on university campuses and has spread from there. We see weak national leadership, indoctrination rather than education, the rise of anti- semitism, concentrated power and wealth in the hands of a few, deteriorating honest journalism, a lack of questioning what is going on among most people, and an overvalued stock market. It’s beginning to look like the 1920s and 1930s all over again and it’s coming from both political extremes. Tara and Bari. You are two strong fighters for freedom of speech and honest journalism. Brava to you both.
Goddamn right--and this "forced equivalence" has to be called out at all times, and all places
No need to force an equivalence - Republicans can either take the high road, or they can push "Stop the Steal", but they can't do both.
The MAGA right chose Stop the Steal, so they're just as authoritarian as the woke left.
That’s just a load of BS and you know it. If anything the GOP needs to push back and push back hard.
That's exactly what the woke say too - they hate the "false equivalency" between them fighting for equality and justice, and reactionaries fighting for voter suppression, systemic racism, and patriarchy.
They'll of course say that "if anything, progressives need to push back and push back hard".
Such is tribalism. In reality, both left-wing and right-wing politics are sliding into authoritarianism.
First of all, I thought you might like this quote: “ When I call myself a conservative, what I really mean is that I am a traditional liberal in the old fashioned sense of the term. Bret Stephens The NY Times” I’m no longer a fan of The NY Times (and agree with Bari Weiss as to why she left) and I don’t totally disagree with your observation. Clearly most of the radicalism is coming from the left but I suggest not ignoring the right either. In politics, wealth and even religion, the middle ground is disappearing and the extremes are growing. As the old saying says, “If you’re not concerned, you’re not paying attention.” Be well.
Insofar as the middle ground is disappearing, this is overwhelmingly the (deliberate) doing of the Wokesters, likely much at the behest of their social media pals/ masters.
I’m not sure I can blame this on one group or on political leaning. I’ve watching process developing as far back as the 60’s, mostly in But not exclusive to the West Coast. If I am to understand so-called “woke culture”, it began decades before.
This is perfect. Couldn't have said it better. One side acting badly does not exonerate bad behavior on the other.
Are you serious? Right now we have an ex-president pushing blatant lies about a free and fair election and a Republican party enabling him, attempting to pass laws and install compliant election officials in places that will help them pull off the steal they failed at last time. Listen to Steve Bannon's podcast or Dan Bongino's show, which combined have millions of listeners. They are practically calling for civil war - Bannon in particular is pushing seditious falsehoods and encouraging the next coup attempt. And that's not even mentioning the blatantly fake nonsense regularly spewed by OAN, Newsmax, and Fox News.
We are edging precariously close to the brink of armed conflict and civil war, because a terrifyingly large segment of the right has decided that it no longer wishes to respect the norms of truth, democracy, or civility, and prefers waving it's guns around and engaging in Turner Diaries fantasies about the coming revolution. Reference the recent Turning Point USA convention where someone stood up and asked Charlie Kirk "when do we start killing these people?"
We all know the problems of the left. Don't come back at me with whataboutisms regarding BLM riots or woke media bias. We're all aware.
But if you're blind to what's happening on the right, you've got your head in the sand. The radical right is feeding off the radical left, and vice versa. And the right is a far bigger threat to the structural integrity and physical safety of our democracy right now. Trump broke our long history of Presidential election losers gracefully conceding, which is the lynchpin of our democracy, and has a quarter of this country now believing that the last election was stolen from them and that they will be justified in whatever underhanded means they use to take back power. At least the left is still respecting legitimate democracy.
There is good evidence that 2020 wasn't a fair presidential election. Zuckerbucks are one of many biased interventions that helped Biden. As Time magazine admiringly puts it: "a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information". (https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/).
No other country in the world has changed how it votes because of Covid. Everyone else just lined up (with extra spaces between) and voted as usual (sometimes in bigger rooms). There was no need for all that mail-in voting. Very few countries allow mail-in voting because they recognise that it is prone to problems. There is no way to prove who voted and that they voted free of any intimidation. Mail-in ballots aren't secret ballot votes.
Unfair elections in the US aren't unusual, Nixon, Gore and Kerry had good reasons for thinking they were shafted. But it was Clinton & Obama that wouldn't concede. They did in public, but behind the scenes they set the "insurance policy" of the Russian investigation farce into motion. While Trump talks a good fight, Clinton & Obama actually acted to de-legitimise Trump.
"No other country in the world has changed how it votes because of Covid."
As a Canadian, no other country HAD to change much. Australia gives everyone a guaranteed paid day off work on election day (federal law), so people had plenty of time to stagger their trips to the polling station. Canada has wide open advance voting, so it's more like Election Week rather than Election Day.
The US is uniquely obstructionist in its voting practices (mostly due to Republicans), so Covid gave Democrats a valid reason to force through a bunch of changes that they already wanted to make anyway.
Opportunistic? Sure. Self-serving? Absolutely. Fraudulent? Not even close. The votes for Biden were real; Democrats just made voting for Biden (or Trump or whoever) much easier/more convenient.
Delusional. But keep yammering. US polls are open to accommodate voters, usually from 6 am to 7 to 9 pm. Moreover, ballots are available to any showing a need. If voting is too difficult for a person, maybe they shouldn't be voting.
"If voting is too difficult for a person, maybe they shouldn't be voting."
That's Republican electioneering in a nutshell; make voting as inconvienient and difficult as possible, so that voter turnout drops down through attrition. The lower the voter turnout, the higher the probability of a Republican victory. Nothing scares Republican strategists more than the prospect of too many American citizens coming out to exercise their voting rights.
Democrats outmaneuvered Republicans in 2020 by making voting much easier and more convenient, using Covid as an alibi. As a result, voter turnout was at an all-time high.
Doesn't mean what they did was "fraud"; if anything increasing voter turnout makes the results MORE representative of the will of the people, not less.
The point was that voting in most counties continued to be voting in-person on the day with ID. As before Covid. Yes, Canada changed some things, which led to queues in Toronto. Everyone else carried on much the same as before.
Actually the US is pretty much average. Few places have provisional voting like the US. Almost everywhere requires ID. Voting by mail is popular in a few countries, but usually it is restricted to absentee voting. The voting hours are a little shorter in the US than in some other places. Some countries allow non-citizens to vote.
I think you will find that Democrats are just as good at tilting elections when they get the chance.
I didn't say they were fraudulent, I said they were good reasons to think they were unfair. Far more Zuckerbucks went to places that voted Democratic than Republican. This drove up the turnout in Democratic areas. So the equivalent of the tactic of having more voting machines and polling places in Republican areas. This is exactly what Kerry's campaign complained about in Ohio in 2004. Neither is fair, it has to be equally easy or hard for everyone to vote for an election to be fair.
Electioneering is definitely more of a political football in the US than in other countries, and I agree both sides do it.
Wow, you must work for Gateway Pundit. Nice job of completely misrepresenting an article with an out-of-context quote to give the impression that Trump's claims have the imprimatur of legitimate media. I heartily recommend people actually read the article that you referenced. Here's the gist:
"The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted."
Oh, and the quote you referenced? Let's see the surrounding text:
"That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures."
Paranoid fever dream indeed.
I'm well aware of the importance of the secret ballot. But in practice, it would be almost impossible to coordinate a mass intimidation campaign enough to swing the results of a Presidential election without it being noticed. And even if that wasn't the case, in person voting isn't secret anymore either. We live in a society where virtually every single adult walks around with a high definition video camera that fits in their pocket. Good luck trying to keep those out of the voting booth. I'm sure that will go over well with all the voters carrying concealed weapons these days. They've even mostly given up trying to ban them at live performances.
And your remark about other countries is misleading. Most other countries didn't need to make changes because they've already made voting easier. Voting is typically allowed over a period of several days rather than a single day, often on either a weekend or a national holiday so that people don't have to schedule their vote around going to work. Some of them even have secure online voting with a national voter ID card. Compared to the rest of the world, the US system has long been creaky and outdated, still scheduling voting on a Tuesday, the most inconvenient day of the week, because of some ancient justification involving travel time in the days of horse-drawn carriages (which is also why we still have this stupid Congressional ceremony to count Electoral votes instead of just declaring the results when they're submitted at the Electoral College, or just tallying them remotely as soon as they've all been certified). Mail-in voting was appropriate for the pandemic, and can go away when the threat recedes, but early voting is definitely something that should remain in place.
But the real reason Republicans want everyone to have to wait in line in election day is because they believe (as Trump once accidentally admitted) that lower turnout favors Republicans. Since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act they've passed various laws that would have never before passed muster, making it less convenient for people in poorer and more urban areas to vote. Also, Trump's exhortations for his supporters to not use the mail in ballots worked, which we knew well ahead of time from polling and party affiliation. Mail in ballots overwhelmingly favored Biden, which, combined with the high turnout and most states not being allowed to tally the mail-ins until the election night, virtually ensured the "blue wave" phenomenon that was predicted well in advance by numerous journalists and election experts. Many of whom also anticipated (from Trump's test-driving of this idea in Florida in 2018 - "must go with result on Election night!") that Trump would exploit this to claim that he'd actually won and the vote had been stolen from him.
And look what happened. Trump did exactly that. Despite plenty of advanced warning that we probably weren't going to know the results on election night, and attempts to educate voters that the idea of a vote being decided on election night was something of a mirage created by TV since the late 20th Century, millions of people bought into a scam they'd have been alerted to well in advance if they'd simply been paying attention to our supposedly horribly biased and unreliable mainstream media instead of watching Fox News.
Gateway pundit, never heard of it.
Yes, I heartily agree people should read it, that's why I included the link.
The article is a good example of a Rorschach Test, as the authors knew. They knew what had happened would be seen by some as making the election unfair, so they spun it the other way as safeguarding the election. To one its rigging, to another its fortifying. But lets look at what the article says were concrete steps the groups took and see if those steps were fair or not?
1) "They got states to change voting systems and laws"
Mostly this seems to have been changing the rules followed by counties for how much checking to do on postal votes and to extend early voting. The checking changes weren't applied equally by all counties in a state. Some, mostly Republican, followed the old stricter rules, some, mostly democrat, followed the new looser ones. This gave an advantage to Biden. The changes to extend to early voting also probably helped Biden, the (mostly useless) polls had him further ahead in early October than early November.
2) "helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding."
Did this money go equally to every county? No, it went heavily to Democrat leaning counties. This gave an advantage to Biden.
3) "They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation"
Did this effect Trump and Biden equally? No. The suppression of the stories about the Biden families dodgy business dealings would by itself (judging by the exit polls) have been enough to swing the election to Trump.
4) "[A] national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks,"
This was fair, it couldn't have effected the result.
5) "there was a need to explain a rapidly changing election process. It was crucial for voters to understand that despite what Trump was saying, mail-in votes weren’t susceptible to fraud"
Mail-in votes are susceptible to fraud. Everyone knows this. Everyone agreed this was the case pre-Covid and pre-Trump. A simple case in point. A voter isn't supposed to vote in two states. Many people have lived and voted in more than one state, so they are on two states voter rolls. e.g. Snow Birds, in New York and Florida. In person its very difficult to vote twice, by mail it's easy.
Did this help Biden or Trump? Well given that it directly contradicted Trump and agreed with Biden it could hardly do anything other than help Biden.
In many places taking pictures in polling booths is illegal, even if it's of yourself. The point is more about chain of custody. If at some point someone gets a hold of the votes they can be altered, this might be done in person. I'll give you money if you vote the right way, or it might be done afterwards. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labour-s-stolen-votes
Voting in most countries is in-person, with ID, on the day. Some countries do vote over the weekend, many do not. Voting in-person during Covid is perfectly safe, so long as it is quick and the building is airy. (If it wasn't, all the shops would be closed.) Typically even when mail-in voting is allowed it is limited to absentees. 5% of votes is a typical figure not 50%.
The problem with early voting is that voters are voting before they have full information. Campaigns inform voters, debates, flyers etc. Many, many, elections have been decided in the last week as some new information comes to light.
Most of the commentary about Republicans passing laws to make it harder to vote are bogus. When looked at in detail they do no such thing. e.g. https://www.gpb.org/news/2021/03/27/what-does-georgias-new-voting-law-sb-202-do which actually addresses some of the points you make but has been described as Jim Crow.
I agree that a result on the night was unlikely and that Trump should have joined the efforts to tell people that. That didn't effect the result though.
No, I don't. Because it's the exact same thing I get every time I engage someone about the problems on the right. Throw it out there if you want, but what's the point when I already agree with you? What's the point when what we're arguing about is the supposed *lack* of extremism on the right, not the presence of it on the left.
I suppose it's fair to say I opened things up at the end to discussing which side is worse. Ok, reasonable people disagree on that. My original intent was to counter your claim that there was no extremism on the right, so it seemed natural to point out that the right was arguably worse. If you want to argue that point, then by all means, talk about Kenosha and Portland. But I'm stunned that you see this as an entirely one-sided affair.
There is extremism on the right and on the left.
Back in the 80's and 90's we were all focused on the right because they were the primary problem.
Today, we look at the left because they are the primary problem and the greater threat.
Maybe that will change again, but TODAY, here and NOW, the problem is that extreme left, its growing influence and its tendency towards authoritarianism and intolerance. That so many of our institutions are being eaten alive by it from the inside is our greatest challenge.
Right NOW we need to break the hold and influence of the hard left and find some way to empower the old liberal minded center left. Sorta like how we had to break the Freedom Caucus to get some semblance of normality on the right.
And Trump was never on the right. He is his own unique beast, detested as much by the far right as the left. If people loved him it was for the simple fact that he did not give a shit about what the DC establishment or the donors thought and he was willing to stick his finger in their eyes.
You think Trump is detested by the far right? You and I must have a different definition of the "far right". I can tell you that we have a growing right-wing militia problem in this country. We had one in the 1990's (there were also some left-wing militias at the time) but the crackdown after the Oklahoma City bombings sent it scattering.
It reconstituted itself in 2008 with the election of Obama. It has been growing ever since - and those people *love* Trump. The movement is infused with "Christian" nationalism in a perverse way where Trump has become a messianic figure. Trump already has the overwhelming support of American evangelicals, and pastors who oppose him are getting shoved aside and leaving their churches.
Now, you can quibble with whether Trump deserves to be called "right". Certainly plenty of conservatives will tell you he's nothing like the "conservatism" that they've always lived with. Most political scientists certainly feel the term "right-wing" applies. But all of this is just arguing over the definitions of words.
Whatever Trump represents, it has taken over the Republican party. A majority of Republicans, around two thirds in most polls, firmly believe that the 2020 election was stolen. And it has taken a particularly terrifying hold in Evangelical circles. We all saw Trump agitate for the rally that day on social media - what we didn't see were the advertisements and flyers that went out to evangelical parishes at the behest of Trump-supporting pastors giving Trump's claims the imprimatur of Evangelical leaders.
Evangelicals have long represented a sort of hidden sub-culture in America. Before losing the battle against the teaching of evolution in schools, they were very politically active. Afterward, they withdrew from politics and homeschooled their kids. They lived in a bubble where members were encouraged not to watch mainstream television or listen to mainstream music. This made them sort of a soft cult - not powerful enough to prevent escape but strong enough to effectively create a sort of alternate reality where fundamentalist beliefs could thrive. When they got back into politics in the late 20th century, they became an essential component of the Republican base, making a sort of strange coalition with libertarians and fiscal conservatives.
This ended up creating an odd kind of fusion political/religious identity in which being Evangelical meant supporting fiscal conservatism and Republican candidates for office (something previous Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham had hoped to avoid). With the arrival of Trump, the marriage of the different components of the Republican party began to weaken, and many traditional Republicans ended up distancing themselves or leaving the party; others have rationalized Trump or seem content to wait him out. Perhaps you are part of this latter group.
Regardless, what we have at the end is a solid core of Trump worshippers and an outer rind of more traditional Republicans willing to keep their heads down and hope he goes away. I have even read recently that there are a significant number of people who identify as Evangelical but never attend church. Apparently this is different than the traditional "convenient Catholic". These are people who are only weakly religious but identify as Evangelical primarily because it has become almost synonymous with this new kind of Republican - nationalistic, militant, mostly white, working class, and with a passionate hatred of liberals and Democrats. A subgroup of it has now been mixed up with Q-Anon craziness to create this perverse pseudo-Christian "theology" (not that it's terribly well defined) centered around Trump that is perhaps the most dangerously deranged. But overall the party base is owned by Trump.
So if you think right NOW you can just focus on the left and ignore the right, I have bad news for you. The left may control cultural institutions, but the right still controls most of the political machinery in this country and are poised to restore it through both legal and extra-legal means - and they have the backing of a substrata of heavily armed and severely delusional people whom we got a short glimpse of on January 6th. And they're talking revolution and civil war.
Of course, we won't get anything like the American Civil War of the 19th century. There won't be two sides lining up in a field - that would be a massacre for the vigilantes. It will be scattered and decentralized, more resembling the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the late 20th century. Unless we do something to stop it. Until then, people who see this are going to keep voting Democrat, and the left-wing narratives about white supremacy are only going to seem more and more reasonable.
Every team thinks that. Woke lefties think they're defending themselves and marginalized communities from right-wing aggression. Even the KKK thought they were "defending" white America from uppity black threats.
Such is tribalism.
I don't think it's that simple. I think both sides are attacking and see it as justified in defense against the other side.
I am a moderate progressive. I could go on for some time about what I have seen as right-wing aggression since the mid-1990s. I imagine you could do the same with the left. To some extent I understand, even more than I once did. We are smug and self-righteous, and while I once pushed back on such accusations, I have always hated the way we overused claims of racism and sexism. Charges of homophobia were far more justified, thought now that we've largely put that behind us, we have the new cause du jour of transphobia and along with it the most fanatical activists I've ever seen on the left. And now it's to the point where we have a tendency to criticize *everything* through the lens of X-ism or X-phobia (like the progressive response to Lori Lightfoot's criticism of the Chicago Teacher's Union) as if the only way something can be bad is if it affects someone other than white males. So yes, I get why people on the right feel like they're being attacked.
But don't forget that when these culture wars began, the right actually had the upper hand in terms of public opinion. As that began to shift, and the left began amassing cultural power, Republicans were amassing power at the state level. Smart politics yes, but not necessarily healthy when you look at the undemocratic ways in which they've tried to tilt the playing field to avoid having to grow their base, and in this way rule from the minority (severe gerrymandering, restrictive voting laws, years of frivolous and baseless accusations of voter fraud, Republican state legislatures stripping executive powers from incoming Democratic governors, etc.).
This all culminated with Trump and his shameless ploy to maintain power despite losing the election, and a party base becoming increasingly obsessed with guns, receptive to wild conspiracy theories, and comfortable with apocalyptic talk of preserving their civilization through militant force.
So progressives have infected our cultural institutions with their illiberalism and McCarthy-esque trashing of our public discourse, and the right has developed a dangerously militant authoritarian streak which now has the imprimatur of the Republican establishment. We will not succeed in opposing one of these in isolation, because they both feed off one another. They must be attacked in tandem.
I'll keep my eye out for articles and I will look for your book.
Best of luck to you.
I am so grateful for substack.
I refuse to buy any of the major papers here in the US even when the Wapo and NYT are offering me deals for a $1 a month. Useless rags. I do not have cable because I find the news on CNN, MSNBC, FOX and the major networks to be no better than cheap propaganda.
YET....I pay over $200 a year for substack subscriptions for only 4 authors because they are worth reading.
Sadly I would add the WSJ to your list of useless rags. I hold my subscription there for the editorials only, even as the front page "news" becomes increasingly irrelevant.
Me too. It’s gone the wrong direction, as did The Economist several years ago.
Oh God...The Economist. There is nothing economic in it anymore. Its just progressive politics and geopolitics from a progressive POV.
Canceled my subscription years ago.
Thanks to above posters for pointing out the loss of The Economist and the WSJ. With regards to the latter, it has also become very poorly written, almost embarrassing at times. If those are the best young writers the Ivy League can turn out, they are pathetic, indeed
Me too.
Yes. Dropped WSJ months ago
I thought about adding that to the list....came really close. Tragic, I used to really look forward to buying a copy.
Wrung...i see that the NYT is buying their subscribers, paid $500,000,000.00 for , get it, "the athlete"...don't ask.
Wrong - it’s the NYTIMES that’s off the rails. Cancelled that a few years ago when it was obviously woke’. the WSJ is about the only paper reporting the news.
I think the point is that everybody KNOWS the NYT is that. The others used to be alternatives, but no longer are
Tara, congratulations on waking up, but I think it's a little disingenuous to blame this on radicalism that emerged from ivy league schools.
This tyranny we're all experiencing started with progressives, specifically progressive journalists and influencers.
Basically, when anyone questioned the progressive worldview, or pushed back against the "diversity" crammed down our throats, we were labeled bigots. That bullying was very effective, and the snowball that followed was the inevitable end result.
I agree. The assertion that this all came out of nowhere over a period of about 18 months is absurd. Most of these stunning and brave "new MSM" warriors (for example, I would exclude Greenwald from my critique) only started bolting when the bell started ringing for them and the grass looked greener on the other side. Prior to that, they were more than happy to nurture, support, celebrate and suckle the beast that sustained them, until it inevitably turned on them.
I used to think it was great when the sharks inevitably turned on each other, but now I just want this dystopian nightmare to end.
And why would you exclude Greenwald?
He (w/ Taibbi) has been sticking his neck out on related matters, esp. RussiaGate, for at least 5 years.
He never changed horses.
"This tyranny we're all experiencing started with progressives, specifically progressive journalists and influencers."
The thing is, where do you think they all went to school and got their journalism degrees? Batya Ungar-Sargon talks about that, about how one begot the other.
Could be. There is a symbiotic relationship going on, but college didn't turn me into a radical.
Somewhat related, I just read a pertinent quote:
"Revolutions tend to turn on their makers, and now it was the Jacobins' turn to face the terror they unleashed.
I think they do that because revolutions work really well as a disguise. This is why you have so many "feminists" who only love feminism when it gives them a chance to knock over someone who's thinner and prettier than they are, and why so many Republican family-values politicians get caught trying to cadge sex out of guys in men's rooms. A movement is a great place to hide if you're exactly the opposite of what it says it's about. It's an ideological version of regulatory capture.
Dave, I’ll weigh in a little differently. While I agree with some criticism of the journalists who walk away from their prior LEFT side bastions, I’m not inclined to punish my new allies. They are coming over - maybe not en-mass yet but enough for Bari to acknowledge with a “welcome to the new mainstream”.
Besides that, I see the real seed of most of this as the Universities, and they’re taking very little blame or corrective actions. The media “elites” drank too much of the Kool-Aid, even if it was with honest intent.
I would ask some of them to truly talk to us and find out why we saw this all so much sooner than they. I’ll be happy to check out Tara’s substack and I have a hunch that I’ll be moved to subscribe, though I agree that I’m not gonna be able to subscribe to much more. That might get solved if some start to congeal into big enough group(s) to convince me to cancel my WSJ and just come here.
Well said.
I don't want to punish anyone, and I despise groveling apologies, but it would be nice if people who went too far would at least own it.
Everyone with even the most basic intellectual curiosity understands the dangers of extremism, even if it's well-intentioned.
Also, campus radicalism is decades old, so I don't think there's a direct link, necessarily. I think there is a direct link to the erosion of ethics in journalistic standards, though.
Where do you think those progressive journalists and influencers went to school? Even if they didn't attend Ivy League, they attended schools that emulated Ivy League.
I am no longer surprised when lefties wipe the fog from their eyes and 'suddenly' realize that they didn't know what were the repercussions of their befuddled world-view. Painting the dystopias of every Marxist state as mis-applied Marxism, they plow on into Marx lite, never having read Marx or Lenin, at least not critically. A world view that excludes God Is a world view that proceeds without light. It attempts to describe what it will not see.
And, the answer is, yes, I have read Marx, and found his ranting preposterous.
He sure got that "religion is the opiate of the masses" part right though.
These days it might be more accurate to substitute "political extremism" for "religion"
Sam Harris once made a similar point:
"People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship.
Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable."
Except the political atheist ideological regimes of the 20th century killed over 100,000,000 people. No religion for the entire history of humanity can compete with that record.
Harris essentially equated religion with political ideology in order to erase this radical distinction. It is harder to hate on religion when compared to body count of atheist regimes.
Hitler was a vegetarian - doesn't mean vegetarianism leads to genocide. You're confusing correlation with causation.
Harris identified the specific causal factors, which are also heavily present in religion.
I’m not confusing anything. I’m suggesting Harris is motivated by an anti-religious pov. Mostly because he’s motivated by an anti-religious pov.
Ideologies are ideologies. Adding God or taking God away from the equation makes them very different things.
People have never become too reasonable. All people everywhere in all times have been driven by emotion, and have thus rejected “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” James 1:27 KJV
You answered yourself below much more cogently that I could have.
“Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as “brainstorm” and “lame.””
——————————————————-
Brainstorm? Really?
This reminds me of a road trip to Calgary when my buddy in the back, who definitely did not have vodka mixed in the Tropicana he was drinking, sudden said
“What the f***???”
That is when we realized we were driving near the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Fort Macleod, AB called
‘Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump’
I feel like they should have canceled that one before they got to ‘brainstorm’, no?
“The buffalo jump was used for 5,500 years by the indigenous peoples of the plains to kill bison by driving them off the 11 metre (36 foot) high cliff.”
Obviously, it’s indigenous so it really cannot be offensive because of diversity and stuff, even though it was fairly shocking to a car full of frat guys who then spent the next two hours coming up with fake names for Canadian towns we drove through like ‘Blunt-Force-To-Groin Tractorsville’.
😂😂😂🦬🦬💀💀
I don't get "brainstorming," either. And I'm not going to look it up, because I will lose what little IQ I have left. Lame ....
I bet they got together to brainstorm how to make ‘brainstorm’ offensive.
KD...that's really "Lam en it".
Yes, "brainstorm". Its offensive to the lobotomized.
Why? Haven't their brains been stormed? ;)
It’s all about pandering to black Progressives. They are anti-brain about everything; Get rid of test scores (so you can’t see how bad blacks are doing); Competition of any sort is bad (because blacks don’t fare well); insist on quotas to the detriment of all other races (because that’s the only way blacks can get in anywhere); and just keep pandering to the black community. That’s precisely what Joe Biden did in his Atlanta speech yesterday in front of a black audience- he accused at least half or more of the country of being ‘racist’ if they didn’t pass his voting bill. This is coercion at the highest level. Rather despicable that.
It's progressives alright, but in my experience, it's almost always white progressives speaking for black folk.
I recall watching, in the mid 90s, a young white liberal woman lamenting the plight of homosexuals and black people as if they were a single category.
The response from fellow, and black, student was pretty revealing.
Short version was stfu and get off "our side." The young man had very definite ideas about this phenomenon. Though this observation is anecdotal it may have merit, the majority of those white progressives I witnessed advocating (unasked) on behalf of black people were very well educated women from well heeled families. About as remote from the object of their concern as could be. Although not squarely analogous it still reminds me of what Dickens called telescopic philanthropy, plus, I really love the term so I'm gonna use it. 😉
In my experience this is more what white progressives advocate for on behalf of black people rather than what black people themselves are advocating for. Similar to luxury beliefs like "defund the police." You find me one inner city black person who agrees with that sentiment.
I dont think its black progs at all. Most black people are either apolitical, inactive politically, tied to the local community or church and the issues there, or...media stars and profs like Joy Reid, Ibrahim X Kendi, who survive not on black prog money, but on white prog money. Black progressives are not all that different from the white Karen's on your school board, and the ballerina bun wearing Brooklyn beta boys in skinny jeans who still think Hillary lost cuz of Putin.
"ballerina bun wearing Brooklyn beta boys" Now, THAT's alliteration--well done! Of course, Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism" stands alone...
I wish Tara well, but the Substack big hitters already cover this ground pretty thoroughly.
I suggest a narrow focus on calling out particular Canadian insanity, which is almost invisible to Americans, so thoroughly is it censored in American MSM--perhaps that is already planned. Canadian Wokeism has a particularly and nauseatingly sanctimonious stench--a bunch of tight-assed white people lecturing America about its many failings...
https://i.insider.com/5a8fe95daae6051d008b4592?width=750&format=jpeg&auto=webp
"The story of Tara Henley is the story of countless liberals. Until recently, they were the ones pushing everyone else to be more tolerant, more understanding, more open-minded, more compassionate."
WHAT?? When, exactly? When was the "story of countless liberals" one of "pushing everyone else to be more tolerant, more understanding, more open-minded, more compassionate"?
Please provide examples. Show your work.
Tolerant of Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin? Tolerant of JK Rowling and Martina Navratilova? Tolerant of PA Governor Casey (no, I'm talking about the pro-life Casey, the elder Casey)? Tolerant of the Colorado caterer? Tolerant of Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson and Condoleezza Rice?
My God, the list is endless. I'm just getting started.
Cancel culture ideology is NOT a recent phenomenon; it's been the modus operandi of the Left everywhere, and of the Democrat Party in America, for YEARS.
PUH-leeze do NOT insult our intelligence or our memories with such claptrap as "Liberals have always been the compassionate and tolerant and open-minded and understanding ones". Good grief.
Having said that, it's only fair that I also say that I like Tara's column and I wish her well. I'll be subscribing, because IMO the alphabet legacy media need to be burned to the ground and the earth salted where they stood, and indy journos need to be supported regardless of whether their politics dovetail with mine. I'm guessing hers don't, which is even more reason to subscribe, IMO. I don't want echo chambers.
It's funny you mention JK Rowling; lefties LOVED her back when conservatives were trying to get her books banned for "promoting witchcraft". Then one day she uttered some opinons that were deemed wrongthink (despite still being a very mainstream opinion), and she became public enemy #1.
The days when a person like JK Rowling was still welcome in the progressive club are the good old days of promoting tolerance/compassion that Bari & Tara are talking about.
"The days when a person like JK Rowling was still welcome in the progressive club are the good old days of promoting tolerance/compassion that Bari & Tara are talking about."
And when were those good old days? Bari & Tara suggest that it was "recently". I suggest it was, if it was *ever*, it was decades ago. Remember, pro-Life Gov. Robert Casey (D-PA) was UNinvited to the ... 1992 Democrat National Convention *because* of his pro-life views (notwithstanding the media's efforts to change the narrative).
In 1991 we all know what the Left did to Clarence Thomas during his confirmation process.
That's at least three decades of the Left's lack of tolerance, understanding, compassion, and open-mindedness, a far cry from "until recently".
I'd say that this new strain of woke intolerance started creeping through issue by issue around 15-20 years ago (starting with "islamophobia"). It then spread issue-by-issue, until now it's consumed more or less all of left-wing politics. Different people are invested in different issues, so the woke movement "came for them" at different times in that slow-creeping hostile takeover. Maybe for Bari Weiss it was Israel and the BDS movement, who knows.
I wouldn't start the clock based on the abortion issue, just because of how much of a 2-way street that issue is. I still remember when Tomi Lahren got canceled on the right for coming out as pro-choice. Pro-life Democrats have always been roughly as popular as pro-choice Republicans.
Popularity may be similar, but in 1996 pro-choice NY congressman Susan Molinari not only spoke at the GOP National Convention, she gave the keynote speech.
So, vis-a-vis abortion apostates, the Left and the Right are not similar.
Also, I didn't start the clock on abortion per se. The Casey and Thomas episodes happened at the same time, and the Thomas one was about far more than abortion.
Before my time TBH; I'm a 30 year old Canadian.
LOL, I did not know that, eh?!
Ditto my mention of Martina Navratilova. She was a darling of the Left until she expressed skepticism or criticism of the trans movement in women's sports (I think that was the issue). Then, she became the Worst Person on Earth to the Left.
So yeah, it's not just those on the Right for whom the Left has ALWAYS had contempt and intolerance. It's also for anyone on the Left who dares deviate even one iota from Leftist dogma.
You Will Comply, Or Else! is the Left's and the Democrat Party's sole animating principle.
It wasn't always that way - there used to be such thing as "big tent" liberalism.
Now, the Democrats don't know WTF to do about the fact their progressive white base has swung way to the left, while their (larger) minority base stayed moderate. The party is slowly being ripped in half.
Not "always", but my point is that it most definitely wasn't "recently", as Bari stated ("until recently"), that you have to go back decades to see evidence of big tent liberalism.
Woke white people only swung out to the left of minorities on racial issues in the last 6-7 years. Defund the Police would have been unthinkable in 2014.
Books are wonderful. Mark Twain said, “The man who doesn’t read has no advantage over the man who can’t read”
As a believer my supposition is that we are made to worship, something. This new ideology is a very strict, very severe, religion. Puritans would blush at its draconian edicts. I’ll pass on it and stay with Christianity, a much more merciful, and grace oriented system
As better thinkers than I have pointed out, for a religion to have any meaning, there must be the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. Wokeism offers neither--it is just Sadism by another name
I mean, Calvinism isn't big on redemption either.
Good for Ms. Henley. My observation, as a news consumer outside the newsroom, is that it took the insiders who have become shocked by the shift to “wokeness” at CBC, NYT, PBS, NPR, WaPo, McClatchy, etc., so long to catch on to what was happening to their profession. If this shift wasn’t evident before the 2016 election, it should’ve become obvious then, as the media - led by the Times - continued to push the farcical, subversive narrative of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia. The same shift has been underway for years with the media peddling irrational panic about climate change.
I’m grateful that reporters such as Bari Weiss, Nellie Bowles, and Tara Henley have seen the light, and are reflecting it back onto their once-respected profession. They join others who awoke before, such as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Tracey. Better late than never.
This line up top speaks volumes: "a parody of the student press." Newsrooms increasingly occupied by those under 30, fresh out of Columbia J-school where they learned about media from a prof with pronouns.
Everything she said could be said of our own NPR, which is why I turned it off several years ago.
I want to feel sympathy for Ms. Henley but this is not a phenomenon that sprung Athena-like in the past 18 months.
This has been brewing at least as long as the mid 90s when I was chastised for using the term, “ladies,” and holding the elevator or other door for people who menstruate. I was borish and crude for such patriarchal vulgarities.
It only got worse from there.
I say I want to feel sympathy because I do. But part of me thinks that Ms. Henley is reaping what she and those like her have sewn for the last 30 years.
This is the world you demanded. Now you complain that you got what you asked for.
Were you really that obscenely blind?
Do us all a favor and work hard to fix what so many of us struggled against for decades… not 18 stupid months.
I've never been fond of slippery slope arguments, because almost everything can become dangerous when taken to an extreme.
One of the main precepts of Common Sense, as far as I can tell, is the idea that people can and should be able to disagree, including on issues of real significance, without demonizing or attempting to silence the other. The toxicity of the modern progressive left is that it is narrowing the range of acceptable thought to such an absurd degree that mainstream opinions, including those held in some cases by a solid majority of Americans, are increasingly treated as thought-crime that must be suppressed. That doesn't mean that everyone who ever supported--and may well still support--affirmative action or diversity initiatives or criminal justice reform reform is just reaping what they've sown, any more than people who express conservative sentiments or support conservative policies are responsible for the worst excesses of the Republican party.
One of the problems with slippery slope arguments is that real world practical events evidencing progress from a to b to c are easy to find.
It is fair to be critical of those who watch the house burn without so much as getting a bucket and later complain about the mess.
That said, and again, it was fair to say, I am glad Ms. Henley found her bucket.