Logical consistency, coherent analysis, the ability to think more than half a move ahead in a game, are not things one would typically associate with the ‘woke’ left. Or at least not the online woke left.
Finding the correct labels and terminology is a bit of a bugger these days as things have shifted a lot since I first learned about ‘left’ and ‘right’ as it applied to politics, but I think we all know what kind of folk I mean when I use the term ‘woke’ left. Whether they’re actually left or actually woke is kind of immaterial - it’s a label for a particular attitude - and a particularly unpleasant attitude at that.
I could explain, in some detail, the kind of behaviour associated with the label of ‘woke’ left I’m using, but it’s fairly well captured by the meme
These are the people who shriek hate at you for stating that men are not women, and vice versa. They think you’re a Nazi when you question the wisdom of mass immigration. If you have qualms about abortion it’s because you want to enslave all women and turn them into baby and sandwich makers.
In any sane society we’d just laugh at people as idiotic and spiritually bereft as these. We’d shake our heads and hope that at some point they would actually grow up a bit. Or get some much-needed therapy.
We didn’t do that. We allowed these demented miserable fuckers to exercise a considerable degree of power. They infested our education systems, our institutions, our governments - and now we have a big problem. A huge problem.
Charlie Kirk’s passion was to try to get people to stop seeing others as less than human. He wanted people to connect with one another through debate, through conversation, and to demonstrate that we could disagree with one another without losing sight of the humanity of those who disagreed with us. Of course he believed in the correctness of his own views and tried to persuade people he was right, but that wasn’t really what he was primarily about. He wanted to show that we could move beyond the crappy culture of “You baddy, me goody” that had arisen, by talking to one another.
It didn’t help that politicians decided that the best way to argue their case was to label around half the population of the countries they wanted to represent in the most inhuman terms possible. When Biden declared MAGA to be some kind of extremist movement, akin to domestic terrorism, he didn’t (or at least his handlers didn’t) see anything wrong with this approach - and yet it’s taken straight out of the “Everyone I Don’t Like is Hitler” playbook.
The more moderate voices on the left didn’t seem to be appalled at this - they seemed to welcome it. They accused Trump and the ‘right’ of stirring up hatred, but were incapable of applying the same reasoning to themselves, as if their own hatred and demonization was, somehow, acceptable and moral and the right thing to do.
Instead of engaging in a battle of ideas, they decided that the way forward was to engage in a battle of good vs evil.
They set the battleground - the ‘right’ didn’t.
It wasn’t just politicians who got in on the act, but influential media personalities weighed in too
Perhaps it can be forgiven if we apply the thinking of Peter Medawar
“ . . . its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself”
But this kind of stuff was everywhere. Thousands, nay millions, of examples could be found without much effort at all. Our societies were saturated with this ‘woke’ left slop masquerading as ‘analysis’. You could see the hate they had - you could feel it.
Conservative voices arguing against this were dismissed and even censored or soft-censored by shadow banning.
What wasn’t too evident, although there were some, were the moderate left-wing voices saying “Hey - hang on a minute. This isn’t right”.
I have spoken a few times about my own ‘awakening’ to these ‘woke’ forces that have shaped so much of our societies over the last few years. I think even then I realized at some primal level just how dangerous all this was. It was back in 2016 whilst I was still living in my academic physics bubble, more concerned with arcane squiggly formulae than world events. I don’t even remember now how I stumbled across it but I watched a video, a long one, of the Yale quadrangle ‘event’ in which a large group of students rounded on a professor.
What I witnessed changed me. I couldn’t properly process what I was seeing, but I knew it was bad and it disturbed me. How could a group of people, perhaps some of the most privileged on this planet to have a place at such a world-respected institution, feel so aggrieved and ‘oppressed’ - or as I write it these days Oppressed™ ?
When I looked into things a bit more only to find the trigger for this had been an email about Halloween costumes, yes Halloween costumes, and a beautifully-written and thoughtful email at that, it kind of blew my mind, as the saying goes.
The students back then were rounding on the husband of the author of that email and demanding he issue an apology for his wife’s email. Professor Christakis, the husband, tried, very calmly and patiently, to understand the root cause of this anger. By talking to them. They were having none of it and only wanted his submission. They weren’t remotely interested in listening to another point of view.
I could not understand the students then, and I can’t understand them now. It’s like we inhabit two different worlds, and certainly two different worlds of thought and morality. I could not see, despite having read the email many times, exactly what was so ‘hateful’ about it. One thing that disturbed me, and repulsed me, amongst many, was the attempt to force Prof Christakis to condemn his wife.
You can see all the elements of what was to come in this encounter. The anger, the force, the unwillingness to engage at a rational level, and emotion used as a manipulative tool.
Since then I’ve seen many, many, more people described by the ‘woke’ as ‘hateful’, or figures of hate, whose rhetoric, allegedly, is violent and who stir up hate and violence with their words. It has become a theatre of the absurd.
When pressed it is almost always the case that these people can not fully explain why any targeted individual is ‘hateful’. You ask for examples of hateful statements that have been made only to find they can provide none, or only provide highly selected and out of context snippets which when you investigate more fully turn out to be much more nuanced and thoughtful statements.
They’re doing this with Charlie Kirk too. Even now you can see these snippets of things he said presented as gotchas to ‘justify’ his assassination. When you read the selected quote, in full context, you realize how intellectually inadequate these ‘justifications’ are. And that’s before we even consider the moral dimension here.
Here’s one from someone who most would consider to be of above average intellect - someone perhaps with considerable influence - who basically just made shit up
King later apologized and deleted his tweet, but the damage was done and not all will have seen the retraction. What kind of muppet is this King bloke? It’s worse than that though, because implicit in his words is the sentiment that it was OK to take Charlie Kirk out because he espoused hate.
Not only have so many been stunned by Charlie Kirk’s death, but so many have now seen the outpouring of jubilation and delight at his death. Some have tried to argue that it’s ‘just a few’. But it isn’t.
What these people are saying is the following :
“it’s OK to kill people if they have views I don’t like”
That’s the message that is coming across loud and clear. Oh, they’ll dress it up by making the claim that Charlie Kirk’s words led to violence and were (somehow) harmful - but fundamentally the position is that if someone is deemed to be hateful it’s OK to kill them.
Notice, as many others have, that for these folk they are OK with doing the deeming. They assume they’re the only ones who get to deem.
But what if someone deems them to be the hateful ones?
By explicitly supporting the assassination of one’s political opponents aren’t they kind of declaring open season?
Like I said - things like logical consistency, intellect, the ability to think more than half a move ahead, and even basic humanity, are not characteristics one would typically associate with the ‘woke’ left.
We, most of us I hope, do not want such an ‘open season’ ever to happen. It would be too awful to contemplate and it would dishonour Charlie Kirk’s memory and legacy too. But the anger is there, and in full view.
What needs to happen is for that anger to be turned implacably to a rejection of the ‘woke’ left and all they stand for - their crushing joyless authoritarian ‘empathy’ that has ruined our societies. I don’t think it’s too much hyperbole to use the word ruin here. How much more ruin should any civilised society tolerate?
Here is a terrible and heart-breaking example of ‘empathy’ in action. The kind of institutional empathy that allows a dangerous and vicious nutter to walk free.
At this point in time I’d be OK with targeting the ‘woke’ and just removing them from any positions of influence - be that in schools, the judiciary, the police, the media, and wherever else they might exert influence. That’s probably what needs to be done - but it goes against all my liberal principles.
They can flip burgers with empathy, for all I care. I’ve kind of had enough and I’m not sure that ‘liberal principles’ are actually enough any more. I am, of course, hoping I’ll calm down a bit and come back to a more reasoned and reasonable approach, but Charlie Kirk’s assassination, what it represents, and the realization that a good chunk of my fellow citizens are ghoulish hideous people with serious moral and mental deficiencies has temporarily deranged me.
This, then, is They/Them.
They may only represent a minority, but those on the more moderate left must surely carry some responsibility here too - they have not dealt with extremism within their own ranks and have allowed it to flourish. They’ve allowed the cancer to metastasize so that instead of a minor surgical incision we’re looking at radical, and now possibly hopeless, treatment.
Once upon a time, the sheep - after yet another attack by a predatory beast - decided that they had had enough.
So they took a vote on what to do, and decided to move from the pasture in the meadow to the moral high ground instead.
Imagine their surprise when being on the moral high ground didn't keep the predatory beast at bay.
And so they took another vote, and decided to prove to the predator that it didn't scare the sheep any; the sheep thus didn't do anything to prevent the predator's attacks since that would men showing the predator it had had an effect on the sheep.
Imagine their outrage when this had zero effect on the predator, despite the sheep deciding in advance ot would have.
Therefore, the sheep voted again, this time deciding to get a shepherd with a gun and a dog.
And when the predator came back again, confident that the sheep would do nothing but bleat, it was - briefly - surprised and outraged.
And when other predators came by and saw the skin of the first one hanging from a tree near the pasture, and saw the skull of the beast atop a pole on the moral high ground, they decided that this isn't worth the risk, and moved on.
And as long as the shepherd and the dog cared for the well-being of the sheep, they enjoyed a quiet and peaceful life as the shepherd made sure to only shear them as necessary and never take more milk than they could spare, and only ever painlessly killing the old and infirm or the terminally ill.
The end.
Best, probably, to always keep in mind that many people are functionally insane these days, and to keep as much distance possible away from them. In retrospect, Mr. Kirk unfortunately wasn't doing that. Hopefully, however, his death will at least give pause to enough of the ongoing thought processes of the poser careless that the cultural hysteria will extinguish itself.
Related reflective Substack post: https://slavlandchronicles.substack.com/p/it-doesnt-pay-to-be-a-veteran-of. Like the writer of this particular post says, "Don't be a Danko".