What do all our notable fabricators—George Santos, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama—have in common?
Well, quite like the Ward ChurchilIs or Rachel Dolezals of the world, one way or another, they lied about their identities. Or they sought fraudulent ways of suggesting their ancestries were marginalized. Or they had claims on being victims on the theory their constructed personas brought career advantages.
George Santos claimed, apparently in search of a victimized status, that he was an “American Jew” and a “Latino Jew,” and a descendent of Holocaust survivors.
Joe Biden lied that he went to “shul” as well as that he grew up in a veritable Puerto Rican household and just happened to attend a black college as well as being an honorary Greek.
Elizabeth Warren ended up a laughingstock for claiming her high cheekbones were proof of her Native-American ancestry—a lie she rode all the way to being the “first” Native-American professor on the Harvard Law school faculty.
Somehow the half-white, prep-schooled Barry Soetoro, who had taken his Indonesian stepfather’s last name, rebooted in the university back to Barack Obama. The latter oddly did not catch his literary agent “misidentifying” him in a book promo as being born in Africa. And only as president, did we learn his “autobiographical” memoir was mostly a concoction.
This fixation with constructing identities is one of the great pathologies of our woke era.
When we obsess in neo-Confederate style on race, ethnicity, or religion as the defining element of who we are, and we do this to leverage political advantage, then we set off a chain-reaction of Yugoslavian- or Lebanese-style tribalism. Like nuclear proliferation, once one group goes tribal, then all others will strain to find their own deterrent tribal identity.
A Society of Lies
There are warning signs all around us of our fate to come if we do not stop this nihilism: Latino members of the Los Angeles City Council caught on a hot mic of matter-of-fact venting tribalist hatred and mocking of non-Latino tribes—blacks, gays, indigenous people, and whites. Or the Jussie Smollett farce, both the lies he concocted to promote his victimhood, and the lies the Chicago prosecutor office initially promulgated to ensure initial preferential treatment for Smollett based on his race. Read the comments posted below news stories of rampant swarming smash-and-grab, knockout game, or carjacking crimes—and be warned of the venomous and tribalist backlash to venomous tribalism.
In a world in which there are too many oppressed for the static number of oppressors, then it is perfectly logical that an Elizabeth Warren on the one hand would fabricate an advantageous identity for careerist opportunity, and a Jussie Smollett on the other hand would invent mythical white MAGA demons to ensure he was victimized and deserving of careerist reparations for his suffering.
Yet the tribal problem is not just an epidemic of false identities and fraudulent victims. Entire areas of social and political reality are now set off and exempt from rational discussion. We are currently witnessing an upsurge in black-male crime, often descending into disproportionate hate crimes perpetrated against Asians and Jews. Yet any discussion of this violence is taboo, lest one is deemed racist or illiberal.
Questioning the morality of allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports and to destroy decades of striving for equal female athletics likewise is put off-limits.
So are discussions about the epidemic of illegitimacy and the negative effects of fatherless families contributing to problems in some minority communities.
Even the national challenge of epidemic obesity is racialized, as if worries about unhealthy weight of all Americans derive somehow from mythical white “body shaming.”
So are inquiries about how the states in tough economic times are to house, feed, care, educate, and instruct 5 million entrants across the southern border, arriving en masse and illegally, all without simple background checks, knowledge of English or a high-school diploma, and in non-diverse fashion. If the first thing an immigrant does is to break U.S. law by illegally crossing the border, and the second thing is illegally residing in the United States, then it is only logical that he concludes further illegal activity will be similarly exempt. Illegal immigration is not a noble endeavor but a crime against its host.
In sum, woke tribalism inevitably turns us into fabricators and society itself becomes a liar.
Against Meritocracy
The old 1970s cynical canard that racial quotas would not extend to pilot training or neurosurgery is no longer true. Some of the major airlines have announced mandatory non-white acceptance quotas for pilot training, and not predicated on competitive résumés or standardized test scores. Many universities and professional schools are considering adopting pass/fail grading on the theory that affirmative action admissions must become synonymous with guaranteed graduation.
Yet what is the alternative once one travels this pathway? Suppose the idea of quota-based admissions is declared valid and salutary. In that case, grading must likewise be recalibrated along this long chain of anti-meritocracy to continue ensuring equality of results.
Licensing boards are next. If one is admitted to universities on diversity, equity, and inclusion concerns rather than demonstrable achievement as quantifiably determined by competitive grades and test scores and other definable exceptional achievements, and one is further graduated on the assurance that grades either will not be issued or will be inflated, then the logical next step is that licensing exam standards in law or medicine must likewise be relaxed so as not to interrupt the ever-lengthening wokeist chain.
In other words, soon where one went to medical school, or what one did in medical school, or where one did his residency, or his certification by a medical board of examiners will become rather irrelevant. The point is not to recruit applicants with the most competitive records and to ensure that they all are subject to the same standard of rigorous instruction and assessment to ensure the public can have confidence in the medical profession, but to make sure that profession measures up to some artificial notions about diversity, equity, and inclusion. The relationship between these metrics and health is beside the point.
We forget that what once separated the Western world from the rest was not race, climate, or natural bounty, but its gradual creation of meritocracies replacing the pre-civilizational rule of the clan, the tribe, or the race. The old inherited and stubborn obstacles remained: aristocratic privilege, class chauvinism, and plutocratic clout that warred with qualifications. They were the ancient impediments to merit whose power in the West slowly was also dethroned.
How ironic in their places, the reactionary Western world has simply created new exemptions and privileges, calibrated on premodern criteria such as race and sex that will set off chain tribal reactions as we degenerate into Hobbesian factionalism.
Anytime perceived merit, or something close to merit, was not the standard, a society either imploded or became impoverished and calcified. The racial, one-drop categories of the Old South or the Third Reich, or the colorized spectrum of the old apartheid South Africa, or the racial chauvinism of the new tribal South Africa, or the commissar system of the Soviet Union, or the religious intolerance of fundamentalist Islam, or the familial gangs and clannish tyranny of prewar Sicily ensured that all were dysfunctional societies, and often much worse than that. Opportunity was instead guaranteed, and excellence defined, by something other than demonstrable talent and achievement.
There will be no exceptions granted to the United States from these rules of history. There are many talented black women in the corporate world, private sector, and elsewhere who would have made excellent vice presidents given their race was incidental and an afterthought to their achievement and talent.
The Best We’ve Got?
But Kamala Harris is not among them. She was selected by Biden’s braggadocio not because of any past stellar record as a Bay Area prosecutor, an accomplished senator, an effective orator, or a superb presidential candidate, but because a frightened Joe Biden amid the George Floyd riots announced in advance that he would preselect his running mate exclusively on the basis of race and sex, sort of in the fashion of the white male-dominated world of the past.
Ditto Pete Buttigieg, who, in his dismal record as a rather inconsequential small city mayor and failed presidential candidate, had never evidenced aptitude for transportation issues—other than occasionally and ostentatiously riding a bike. He was never expected to seriously address problems like spiraling auto fuel prices, the bottlenecks at our harbors, the wild-west train robbing at the port of Los Angeles, the Southwest Airlines implosion, or our clogged freeways. Instead, he was appointed Transportation Secretary because of the diversity of his sexual orientation and his woke rhetoric that almost immediately surfaced in wildly out-of-pocket lectures about “racist” freeways.
Similarly, upon appointment as press secretary, we were immediately told Karine Jean-Pierre was the nation’s first black, gay press secretary rather than being asked to recognize any prior achievement that earned her such a coveted spot. Few said her appointment reflected a successful record as chief of staff for Kamala Harris’ not-one-delegate presidential campaign, or national megaphone for an ossified Moveon.org, or her stellar work as an MSNBC pundit.
What will a university like Stanford do when it admits much of its 2026 class largely on the basis of tribal considerations? It does not release who of the admitted opted not to take the now-optional SAT. It seems proud, in fact, that it has rejected in the past 70 percent of those applicants with perfect SAT scores. So why would one believe that Stanford truly deplores its past Jewish exclusionary quotas, when it easily trumps them in the present—and uses the same argument of diversity to excuse prejudice and disqualifying those who, by its own former standards, had earned admission?
Diversity is neither a strength nor a weakness. Diversity of thought can be helpful, or become chaotic as orthodoxy. Hitler’s 3.7 million soldiers who charged into Russia were especially diverse, but that fact did not make the invaders less murderous.
A multi-religious India is certainly diverse, but is not always calm or humane. Yugoslavia was diverse, and so is current-day Lebanon. Was either country a kinder, gentler, or more successful society than decidedly nondiverse Japan or Poland?
Just as uniformity can result in both stability and stagnation, so too can diversity sometimes ensure either dynamism or bedlam. In all these cases, the emphasis on tribalism is the critical determinative. If a 95 percent Asian or white country defines itself in blood-and-soil terms as did Japan of the 1930s and early 1940s and Germany between 1933 and 1945, then it becomes toxic, unlike a more natural assumption that race is incidental, not essential, even in a racially uniform society.
The same is true of diversity. Accentuate it; sharpen differences; treat individuals as part of tribal collectives—and a descent into violence and anarchy is assured. But consider tribal differences superficial, and human commonality more important than racial difference, then diversity can be enriching through voluntary contributions to the whole in terms of varieties of food, music, art, fashion, and literature. But again, envision diversity as iron-clad calibrations of identity in which the individual cedes to the collective tribe, then a tribally regressive America will be no different from the world elsewhere and our fate is assured.
So, we are headed, dangerously so, into an historically ugly, hateful, and volatile place—all the more so because we lie that it is utopian when it is pre-civilizational and reactionary.
We received about 4 inches of snow yesterday and I’m in good spirits, soooo……
8:00 am – I made a snowman.
8:10 – A feminist passed by and asked me why I didn’t make a snow woman.
8:15 – So, I made a snow woman.
8:17 – My feminist neighbor complained about the snow woman’s voluptuous chest saying it objectified women everywhere.
8:20 – The gay couple living nearby threw a hissy fit and moaned it could have been two snowmen instead.
8:22 – The transgender man… women… person asked why I didn’t just make one snow person with detachable parts.
8:25 – The vegans at the end of the lane complained about the carrot nose, as veggies are food and are not used to decorate snow figures.
8:28 – I was being called a racist because the snow couple is white.
8:30 – I used food coloring to make one of the snow couple a different color and be more racially inclusive.
8:37 – Then accused of using a black face on the snowperson.
8:39 – The middle eastern gent across the road demanded the snow woman be completely covered.
8:40 – The police arrived saying someone had been offended.
8:42 – The feminist neighbor complained again that the broomstick of the snow woman needed to be removed because it depicted women in a domestic role.
8:43 – The ‘council on equality’ officer arrived and threatened me with eviction.
8:45 – The TV news crew from ABC showed up. I was asked if I know the difference between snowmen and snow-women? I replied “Snowballs” and am now a sexist.
9:00 – I was on the news a
Awesome…still laughing!
Great response! Progressive marxists are compelled to continually hate something – anything.
9:00 – I was on the news as a suspected terrorist, racist, homophobe, and sensibility offender, bent on stirring up trouble during difficult weather.
9:10 – I was asked if I have any accomplices. My children were taken by social services.
9:29 – Far left protesters offended by everything marched down the street demanding that I be arrested.
9:45 – The boss called and fired me because of the negative association with work that had been all over social media.
10:00 – I cry into my drink because all I wanted to do was build a snowman.
Moral: There ain’t no moral to this story. It is what this world has become because of a bunch of snowflakes.
Great, my laugh for the New Year.
this is funny- an article of lies about liars
Brilliant!
Thanks – but you’re lucky your day ended early. Many have to go through the whole day like this!
Absolutely brilliant.
I don’t know who you are TD, but I love you for this post. I hope you’re OK with that…
Alas, I can’t take credit for writing this – it was first passed on to me by a friend, author unknown. But it just seemed to suit VHD’s column. And sometimes, making fun of the doofuses is appropriate. Who knows, it might even be effective.
Brought to you by single baby mommas
Very funny.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up in such a tribalistic failed state, and now also sees this dangerous trend happening here. I fantasize that DeSantis will convene a conference (inviting you, Ali, Shapiro, Owens, Prager, et al..) to collectively sound the alarm.
The alarm has been sounded, many times, and those with ears to hear have acknowledged it. These are the remnant, the people who actually think.
Further alarms will go unheeded, because they are summoning the deaf.
This story seems to affirm Victor’s previous comments on the strength on need for middle class virtues of the hard working, get the job done, Everyman that made America great, and thankfully is still around. https://nypost.com/2022/12/30/buffalo-man-jay-withey-known-as-merry-christmas-jay-hailed-hero-for-rescuing-people-in-winter-storm/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=pasteboard_app
“E pluribus unum” is gone, along with “In God We Trust,” and to a large extent, “Freedom.” The three slogans of the United States, imprinted on every U.S. coin.
While your attention was diverted they changed the national motto: it now reads “E pluribus pecunium” (soon to be found on the new Fed cryptocurrency.)
Just call them Flakes. T he addition of ‘snow’ makes them sound seasonal,whereas they are a constant nuance,and, I like snow.Somehow we need a march on Wash.,say in May,to let our grievances be known about the border,energy,sexual indoctrination,etc.With grassroot organizing I think people would come enmasse to protest our so called Representatives that harm us in myriad ways.They are the despicables and in both parties.I am so disgusted I cannot even see the point in voting.
P.S. Hats off to the very funny satire of TD,a guy I would buy a beer for.
Another thoughtful warning by VDH. However, after reading the warnings I’m always left wondering what I can do to protect myself and my family from the coming collapse? Prayer is certainly at the top of the list.
What a MESS we’re in….only one way out🙏🏻
“Hitler’s 3.7 million soldiers who charged into Russia were especially diverse, but that fact did not make the invaders less murderous.”
Victor: How were these troops diverse? Weren’t they all German White males?
Hitler’s invasion force consisted of troops from aprox. 11 different nations. It was supposed to be a sort of secular crusade against “Jewish Bolshevism”.
We need another “Great Flood.”
Watch what you wish for, the next “flood” could be radiation!
Billyjobob
On a few podcasts Victor has mentioned that “woke” is actually a pretty ancient idea. I’d love to hear more about this. I had no idea the concept of woke was so old. It’s funny, I’m not super interested in ancient culture much, but when I heard this I was really fascinated.
Very creative and funny TD! Did you have a couple of Mimosas before packing the snow or did you then get accused of cultural appropriation? 😹
The other day President Biden announced that people traveling from China to the US will be stopped and tested to prevent the spread of covid variants, citing, “We follow the science.” Since he is not concerned about the tens of thousands of folks pouring across our Southern border, who carry the same exact diseases as the Chinese, he must talking about political, not epidemiological science.
It’s interesting that obsession with race isn’t an enlightened idea but is actually pre-enlightened. It makes sense that it is a base and evil way to think and live, but those in our society that think they are the most high thinking actually promote a way of living that reminds me of the slums in District 9.
Love the scifi reference!
Racism, as we think of it today, evolved from the old tribal impulse as it met the expanding powers of the Nation State in Spain. After retaking Spain from the Moors(1492), the Spanish Crown used the idea of “pure Spanish lineage” as opposed to descent from Moorish and Jewish ancestors as a crass litmus test of your likely loyalty to the new Spanish State. They exported this notion to the Americas and the Philippines substituting Moorish and Jewish ancestry for Indigenous cultures (1500s). Following Spanish intervention in the Holy Roman Empire (late 1500s-1648), the politically fractured German speaking peoples used the emerging notion Race as a rallying point to resist French interference (1600s-1814) and to justify German Unification under the Prussian military State (completed 1871). Into the political mix came Darwin’s Theory of Evolution from Common Descent by Means of Survival of the Fittest (circa 1859). Intellectuals around the world appropriated Darwin’s Theory in an attempt to explain global inequality and justify a notion of the State as a space where a single Race can develop its unique genius in order to more effectively compete for survival. Wokeness, rather than repudiate these notions seeks to invert them by rallying “oppressed” and “marginalized” people to form their own enclaves from which to fight the hegemony of the old Race-based Nation States.
Profound in its simplicity, this is one of Victor’s best and important essays that I have read. Meanwhile, I hear a major class action lawsuit is being filed on behalf of all grievously harmed Snow Things.
Back in my day, we called them “killer mutant monster snow goons”. Guess I gotta keep up with the times!
Great point, Mike. BTW, what is happening with China, where a new and more deadly strain is now rampant? Travelers are supposedly tested before leaving China and then again on arrival to the U.S.? And what happens if they test positive?(not to mention having introduced the virus here.)
Freedom used to be the glue that held us together. But as our government eroded our freedom, government benefits and tribalism became the new glue.
And then…..The next day The Snow Individuals melted into one formless puddle of H2O and were mourned and eulogized by Climate Change Global Warmists for having been the pinnacle of enlightenment on a now deteriorating Planet.