Víctor Davis Hanson
The commissars of the old Soviet Union and the Maoists of China were not just ideological bigots but ultimately careerists.
Woke, remember, is a haven, as are all ideological litmus tests, for mediocre wannabees, who seek a different route to lucre that bypasses meritocracy and hard work. The charge of racism! is not so much believed as seen as a trajectory to a well-paying commissariat billet.
What is the attitude of China toward the American woke commissariat? That is, does today’s grasping China send its third of a million students to the U.S. based on their gender, sexual orientation, or ethnic profiles? Do they pay hundreds of millions of dollars to enroll at Yale or Princeton or a hundred other universities because of banner gender-studies or urban-studies or environmental-studies courses?
Does not China, one of the most racist and sexist nations in the world, feed the American woke monster by nonstop accusing the United States of racism! And sexism! Their cynical view of our woke is essentially, “Do continue your wokism to hasten your decline, but for a while longer exempt our own students from it.”
China not only believes woke will hasten our end, but soon it will have no more need of our universities, given China will copy the scientific meritocracy of our old universities, and we will mimic the wokism of their old Maoist universities.
California Governor Gavin Newsom brags that California is the most pro-abortion, diverse, and woke state in the union. No doubt it is.
California spends billions of dollars fruitlessly on the homeless, hosts half of the country’s illegal aliens, and a third of those Americans on public assistance. It is discussing multibillion-dollar reparations to those who were never slaves to be paid by those who never owned slaves. And the state now is broke and facing a growing multibillion-dollar budget deficit, despite the highest basket of income, sales, and fuel taxes in the nation.
During the recent drought-fuel forest fires, the result largely of disastrous green forest management, that devoured millions of acres of trees and polluted the skies of California for months, Newsom blamed “climate change” and predicted “permanent drought.”
Currently California is flooded after weeks of historic rain and snow. The state was long ago warned that its levees were antiquated and dangerous, that its water projects were never completed, and that it lacked sufficient storage.
No matter. The inert state was too busy funding its $300-billion high-speed rail project that resembles the deserted monoliths of Stonehenge after a decade, ballooning the budget for Covid checks, and vastly expanding social services for the undocumented.
The result is that the state has no room for the massive runoff that rushed to the sea after destroying surrounding communities. Whether drought or flood, California simply declares that raging fire and water are due to climate change, as the excuse for squandering massive revenue on woke projects and constituencies while it neglected the stuff of life, like flood and fire prevention, building reservoirs and aqueducts, and repairing ossified infrastructure.
The result of both the recent drought and the current storms is multibillion-dollar damages and wrecked lives. Do we wonder why some 300,000-500,000 Californians leave the state each year, taking billions of dollars in capital with them?
Rather than seeking ways to solve problems and keep their talented citizens home, instead the state schemes for ways to tax them even more after they have left!
Woke jurisprudence blames society when criminals kill, maim, assault, and steal—a fact known to those, who then kill, maim, assault, and steal even more so. For the woke, the victim is a crybaby distraction, a mere broken egg that has no clue the Left is making an omelet of a new lawless society, in which the criminal, released by the protected wealthy, prey on the vulnerable poor and weak.
One is reminded by our national political and social struggles of the course of the French Revolution. Perhaps we are in that first stage of abolishing the ‘Ancien Regime’, although we hear the call to proclaim a new government.
I have been trying to write up a Webster’s like definition for “woke”. I recently saw a clip of a dimocrat asking a witness to define it. She struggled. You help make it clear why. Its not one belief or tactic. Its more than CRT, trans and gay rights, 1619 project, control of government school curricula. As you put it –
“Woke, remember, is a haven, as are all ideological litmus tests, for mediocre wannabees, who seek a different route to lucre that bypasses meritocracy and hard work. The charge of racism! is not so much believed as seen as a trajectory to a well-paying commissariat billet.”
It is more a strategy to control and subvert society in order to acquire power. It involves unearned charges of racism, hatred, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQWERTY+++. You name it. It requires re-defining of words to change historical meanings, even change history itself.
So its more a definition of “wokeism” that is needed. What are the Commissariats and Deep States and political elites willing to do to gain power over the rest of us who see no use for their tortured logic of victimization and defeatism. Webster will never find that definition unless we write it and fight it.
Thank you for your words. They are insightful and enjoyable.
Professor, Your attention to the Latest Hindenburg Research Expose of the Fraud and Corruption committed by the Jack Dorsey Fintech Invention, Square, would share insight to the Systemic Bank Fraud of the Filed COVID Financial Scams which are linked to the Stanford U. generated Crypto Crisis and ongoing Bank Disintegration and Failures.
The US Treasury and Federal Reserve are a far greater threat than any of the Threats that the Biden Criminal Conspirators have employed to lead to ruin.
China and other enemies are crouching like a tiger in wait for the right time to pounce. We are weak and wounded, and will be easy prey. Thank you for an excellent series detailing our many vulnerabilities.
“We are weak and wounded, and will be easy prey. ”
Even if we are ‘weaker’ than we were we’re still a force to reckon with and not one that any country should be cavalier about taking on militarily.
We might lose but like any apex predator, even a wounded one, never ‘easy prey’ and extremely dangerous to treat with disdain!
Just as the election of Joe Biden has proven to be disastrous, it proves (if proof was needed) that the electorate needs quality information about who they are electing – that is precisely why the malefactors in American political society are focused on making sure they don’t have it.
Witness the tampering in information flow to the electorate evident in the Twitter Files, that suborned and suppressed true facts even as it elevated falsehoods and narratives. It was not enough to have politicians performing the coercion of the various media – they also needed the threat of legal consequences if they (the media) didn’t comply. Enter the DOJ and FBI – the Stasi Police of the movement, and the numerous NGO’s that were created to support the movement to coerce the information flow.
Propaganda techniques like these, combined with threats from law enforcement are a powerful combination.
Previous attempts at toppling imperial governments in the past (Ancien Regime, Czarist Russia, Qing Dynasty), operated on societies conditioned to autocratic rule. It will be interesting to see whether a modern version of a Marxist-Communist movement can topple a democratic republic that has been in operation for about 250 years.
I submit that this is a whole different ball game for the prospective revolutionaries.
For old school Marxists, it’s the doctrinally correct situation. Those prior Revolutions (from an os Marxist perspective) jumped the gun and ignored the necessity of going through a complete Capitalist phase before moving on to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Communism.
I just listened to a 1985 interview with KGB defector, Yuri Besmenov who explains the insidious nature of Marxist destruction of free societies like ours. It is a chilling prediction the markers of which are now all too familiar as the policies of the Biden administration (but which obviously started decades earlier) and we might interpret wokiness as today’s Marxist instrument which slowly evolved out of the 60’s. Besmenov warns us that no one will listen to facts or the truth in the slow decades long conversion to a Marxist society and that indoctrination of youth is important. I am beginning to think that the our country is in the destabilization phase —in view of current bank failures and high inflation. See the video here—
https://youtu.be/pOmXiapfCs8
It appears that ex-KGB Besmenov was a better patriot than most in our Government.
Yes! This interview is mandatory viewing!
Maybe we can clone DeSantis and (in time to preclude total disaster) get the clone elected governor of California?