Something’s happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.
The Canadian Freedom Convoy shows the power of the “untouchables” is real, and it scares the hell out of the right people — like that angry former Obama DHS official and Harvard Prof. and CNN Analyst who wanted to slash their tires and destroy their livelihoods.
I feel like chanting, “The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated!”
A must read post is A night with the untouchables, from a Canadian writer who found the media narrative was not true:
I live in downtown Ottawa, right in the middle of the trucker convoy protest. They are literally camped out below my bedroom window. My new neighbours moved in on Friday and they seem determined to stay. I have read a lot about what my new neighbours are supposedly like, mostly from reporters and columnists who write from distant vantage points somewhere in the media heartland of Canada. Apparently the people who inhabit the patch of asphalt next to my bedroom are white supremacists, racists, hatemongers, pseudo-Trumpian grifters, and even QAnon-style nutters… What I haven’t noticed, not even once, are reporters from any of Canada’s news agencies walking among the trucks to find out who these people are. So last night, I decided to do just that – I introduced myself to my new neighbours….They said that they didn’t want a country that forced people to get medical treatments such as vaccines. There was no hint of conspiracy theories in their conversation with me, not a hint of racist overtones or hateful demagoguery. I didn’t ask them if they had taken the vaccine, but they were adamant that they were not anti-vaxers….They felt that they needed to stand up to a government that doesn’t understand what their lives are like. To be honest, I don’t know what their lives are like either – a group of young men who work outside all day with tools that they don’t even own. Vaccine mandates are a bridge too far for them. But again, not a hint of anti-vax conspiracy theories or deranged ideology….As I finally made my way back home, after talking to dozens of truckers into the night, I realized I met someone from every province except PEI. They all have a deep love for this country. They believe in it. They believe in Canadians. These are the people that Canada relies on to build its infrastructure, deliver its goods, and fill the ranks of its military in times of war. The overwhelming concern they have is that the vaccine mandates are creating an untouchable class of Canadians. They didn’t make high-falutin arguments from Plato’s Republic, Locke’s treatises, or Bagehot’s interpretation of Westminster parliamentary systems. Instead, they see their government willing to push a class of people outside the boundaries of society, deny them a livelihood, and deny them full membership in the most welcoming country in the world; and they said enough. Last night I learned my new neighbours are not a monstrous faceless occupying mob. They are our moral conscience reminding us – with every blow of their horns – what we should have never forgotten: We are not a country that makes an untouchable class out of our citizens.
This so fits with what I observed during the Tea Party movement, a vicious and malicious smear campaign against patriots.
Yet as heartening at the Freedom Convoy movement is, two other must read articles accurately reflect the deep rot in this country perpetrated by one (or two) generations of progressivism.
The first, focused on education, is by Robert Pondiscio at Commentary, The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling. Read the whole thing, it’s devastating and accurate that the current educational approach is to lead children to tear down and hate their country:
When education becomes activism, it dwells exclusively in the bad and the broken; at least tacitly it encourages children to see their community and country as nothing more than a collection of problems to be solved, with none of the virtues and blessings of citizenship. Fair-minded people can see that gratitude for what works and outrage at what’s not working are equally important in a well-functioning civil society. But when only the latter is emphasized, it creates in the minds of students the impression that their country is reflexively antagonistic to their interests: What we have, what we have been given, and what some may seek to preserve is wrong, unjust, and must be dismantled, root and branch. If children view their country as mostly or entirely hostile to their well-being, they cannot help but get the sense that there is nothing worth protecting and preserving. It should not be a controversial notion to say that public education must proceed from a moral commitment, grounded in optimism and, yes, patriotism. You must love something before you seek to change it. It is suicidal to think public education should have as its object the dismantling of the institutions and ideals that birthed it in the first place….Few would argue that children should grow up in a protective bubble, cosseted and coddled, insulated from history and the realities of life. It would be impossible in our information and social-media-saturated age. But something is at loose in the land, a change in the weather that has changed how children perceive the world and their place in it. As adults and as educators, we are not merely failing in our responsibility to be a reassuring presence in their lives, we seem perversely determined to normalize and even valorize their despair.
But enough of all this relatively cheerful stuff. A devastating article was sent to me by a conservative academic who called it a disturbing analysis. My response was that it was comprehensive as to the takeover of society, and I agree with almost all or all of it.
The article was No, The Revolution Isn’t Over, by N.S. Lyons, arguing that whatever the good signs about pushback against the ‘woke’ agenda, it is too deeply embedded throughout society to think it’s in retreat:
One would think that by now all these anti-woke conservatives and moderate liberals would have learned at least some of the bitter lessons from the last decade about how political power and cultural change actually work, but I guess not. They could have taken note of all the fundamental factors driving this ideological belief system, all of which had to be painstakingly uncovered, layer by layer, even as it swept through every institution. But they have not. (Like, do they even read the pages and pages of erudite Substack anthropology on the topic? No?) They could have recognized by now that this is not a simple political issue with a political solution, but they have not.Look, honestly I really didn’t want to have to do this. Come the New Year I had resolved to focus on the positives and all that crap. But I haven’t seen anyone else do it, so guess I have no choice and the duty falls to me to deliver the pessimistic news: no, the Revolution is far from over.So, in what might also serve as a handy tour guide to the vast depths of the ideological abyss, catalogued at length here – in convenient listicle format! – are twenty reasons to get woke and despair.
Read the full listicle. Two jumped out at me and ring very true from everything I’ve observed living in academia for almost 15 years and studying K-12, higher ed, and professional schools through Legal Insurrection and CriticalRace.org:
9. Personnel is policy. Let’s imagine, for example, that some lawmakers officially ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in their state’s schools or universities. Will this be the end of the matter? Will all the woke teachers and administrators who consider “consciousness raising” through “critical pedagogy” – or in general what Marxists call “praxis,” the constant need for the transformation of theory into practice – to be practically a religious commandment just stop doing so? No of course not. As one consultant/cleric recently advised teachers, “Don’t say critical race theory, just teach its precepts… You’re going to see how classroom teachers apply some of these pedagogical models in ways where they don’t even mention the words critical race theory but are doing anti-racist work.” Yes, the work of spreading the new good news shall not be stopped! After all, who is going to stop them? Will they be fired by the woke human resources department, or the woke principal? Abandoned by the woke teachers’ union? Reported to the state by their un-woke peers, all of whom have already been systematically purged from the collective for their heresy? If concerned parents do manage to get them fired, who will hire their replacements? Why… the woke HR department! The people who actually set the effective policy of any institution are inevitably the personnel located in the power centers closest to implementation. Or as a Chinese saying goes: “for every measure that comes down from on high, a countermeasure arises from below” (上有政策, 下有對策). That principle works equally well for a revolutionary professional managerial class as it does for beleaguered counter-revolutionary peasants. And in this case the reality is that…10. All the institutional high ground is still occupied. Have the top universities already been retaken from the woke, or replaced? (No, one still imaginary university in Austin doesn’t count.) What about the elite finishing schools? The accreditation companies? Most mainstream news media? The social media companies? The publishing houses? Hollywood? The major foundations? The non-profits and the think tanks? The consulting and accounting companies? The investment banks? The NASDAQ? The digital service providers? The HR departments of the Fortune 500, and most of their boards? The law schools? The Bar Association? The permanent federal bureaucratic state? Heck, even Halliburton? No, at such a ludicrous suggestion the Cathedral merely echoes with the mocking laughter of the new woke high clerisy. They know from experience that…
Okay, not just two of them, these also:
11. Long marches are long. When Herbert Marcuse and the rest of the Neo-Marxists and critical theorists of the Frankfurt School finally took to heart Antonio Gramsci’s directive to seize “cultural hegemony” and first conceived of launching Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions,” it was only the start of the 1970s. It was not until almost fifty years later that their dream was realized. However much the last several years may have seemed like an avalanche of shockingly rapid ideological coup d’états to those who saw power abruptly change hands in their institutions, one after another, this suddenness was an illusion. Coups only succeed if the backers necessary to support them are already in place. And it took literally a generation of young intellectuals and activists simultaneously inspired and disillusioned by the left-radicalism of the 60s entering into and seeding the institutions, rising into positions of power, and cultivating another generation of trained foot soldiers for their influence to fully flower….17. The opposition is still only political. Given all of the above, it should be clear by now that political opposition to the Revolution is rather unlikely to be sufficient – not without resistance on the cultural, educational, economic, technological, and media fronts as well, at a minimum. Yet what else has emerged so far? As outlined in detail above, the woke left is unloading huge amounts of cash to advance the social causes that matter to them. On what social causes has the right matched this level of funding, or even enthusiasm? Does the right even have social causes? …
It’s been a long time coming. It’s not just a 2020-2021 BLM thing.
Yes, the rot is real, deep, and embedded. It’s true.
But I come back to a theme I’ve hit before. The Left Controls Almost Everything, So Why Are They So Afraid?
They control virtually everything: The presidency, Congress, Higher Education, lower education, professional schools and organizations, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, Big Tech and every substantial social media platform, all the large mainstream broadcast, digital, and print media with the exception of News Corp. entities, the HR department of almost every major corporation and many of the boardrooms, the permanent federal bureaucracy, the Joint Chiefs and senior military leadership, the FBI and DOJ, and I could go on and on.It’s hard to think of any major national institution the left doesn’t control, except maybe the U.S. Supreme Court depending on which side of the bed Roberts and Kavanaugh wake up that morning. Which is why they want to symbolically blow it up through court packing, if they could….What is the left so afraid of at their moment of near total control? Do they know something we don’t?…Like the animals that sense a tsunami coming long before it’s visible and run to higher ground, they feel it coming. It’s not a guarantee, but just the thought of it is creating panic.Perhaps they know their strength is something of a charade, it’s unstable, it’s not organic, it’s coerced. When it collapses, they fear it will collapse like a house of cards.
That obvious fear gives me heart and hope. This rot is not natural, it’s manufactured. It can’t go on forever, or things fall apart. The perpetrators of that rot are not the producers of society.
The Canadian truckers revealed where true power in society lies when things fall apart. The people who deliver the food have more power than the people who consume the food. People like that angry Harvard Prof. are waking up to that.
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