Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
In Extremis?
It is impossible for me to take Social Justice Warriors seriously. They are not Bolsheviks or Nazis. They are not intellectual powerhouses or a physical force to be reckoned with. They are mere children and ill-behaved brats at that.
And yet: we must not give an inch. In stable times, we have normal rules. People, not being tested, can be perfectly happy seeking moderation, a middle ground. Diversity can “succeed” because nobody gets too worked up over the fact that some other people think/look/act differently than they do.
But when times are not stable, there is a change in the ground rules. All of a sudden, the less-committed majority becomes powerless in the face of a passionate minority who is willing to do anything necessary to win. In times of turmoil and chaos, minorities like Nazis and Bolsheviks can take control simply because they care more.
This is a threat to America now, as improbable as it seems. The quiet majority may well not care very much for gender-fluidity or screaming that everything happens because of “white privilege.” But the spoiled snowflakes who care deeply about their cause, as delicate and as idiotic as they appear to the rest of us, represent an actual potential threat. And that threat grows every time we give in to “every gender” bathrooms, or “common-sense gun control” or even accepting mandatory diversity training in the workplace.
When we “always believe the woman” we are claiming that men are in fact never to be believed. When we allow them to assign righteousness to the degree of victimhood born by the complainants, then we have turned all logic and reasonableness on its head.
Our civilization is being tested. It is not enough to be right, and quietly decent. Each and every time we encounter SJW stupidity, we should oppose it, and make sure that our voices are heard. For the sake of our liberty and our America, we must not be the quiet majority that is silenced by a shrill shrieking minority. We must push back, and keep doing so.
Published in General
Relax, liberals. No one’s coming for your abortions. We just want some common sense abortion control.
[Edit] This is something I saw on the internet, not something I came up with myself.
Amen. This is exactly right, both in diagnosis and prescription.
Whatever their motives, the strategy that they have adopted is to suppress speech critical of certain viewpoints and to compel speech that seems to endorse certain viewpoints.
I wear a Trump2020 hat in public not because I am crazy about Trump (I’m not), but because I want him to be re-elected and I will be hanged if I’ll be made to feel ashamed about that and unwilling to say it out loud. I scoff at gender diversity and all that claptrap for the same reason.
Every subject should be debatable, no idea should be off limits, and no one should be shut up by the mob. More speech, not less.
Good post, and spot on.
We’re going to find out in about nine months if 2020 is the new 1972. One of the things that irked the left of the day back then was Nixon’s touting of the ‘Silent Majority’, which didn’t make a lot of noise about its beliefs and didn’t get the media attention because they didn’t share the progressive ideology of the media, but it turned out to be accurate.
The progressive Democrats and the media, in the wake of Humphrey’s narrow 1968 election loss, had served to continually prop up their own narrative that Humphrey lost because he was tied to LBJ and was simply not liberal enough in his campaign against Nixon. Toss in the advent of 18-20 year olds voting, and they spun themselves a narrative that the wave of new young progressive voters combined with the hatred of Nixon and his policies had created the moment when the New Left would take control of the White House. And they did briefly seize control of the Democratic Party with McGovern, and by the summer of ’72 set about purging it not just of the southern Dixiecrat power structure but also the Chicago Dailey Machine, as payback for their treatment at the ’68 convention.
In hindsight, the left would have been better off taking the 1970 Hart Hat riot seriously, where union workers building the World Trade Center, who had in general been lifelong Democrats, went after the progressive Vietnam War protestors who were marching through the streets of Lower Manhattan. In turned out the Silent Majority also had its noisy contingent of disaffected blue collar workers who went over to Nixon, while other Dems simply sat the ’72 election out, leading to Nixon’s 49 state landslide. Doubtful Trump’s doing the 49-state thing this fall, but he definitely could add states like New Mexico, Virginia, Nevada and others in November, either because voters dismayed at how far left the Democrats have gone either flip to Trump or simply sit the election out at the presidential level.
That’s a reasonable-sounding analysis, but you overlook the visceral depth and severity of Trump hatred. My fear is of a very motivated left turning out in droves and, with the numerous methods of cheating in elections that we saw tested in 2016, taking whoever the dems nominate to a clear electoral college victory. We have to all turn out.
Reading Tim Alberta’s long take in Politico on his visit to a Michigan gun show and the huge pro-Trump attitude of the attendees, you also see some comments from people that showed how much Trump’s 2016 win and the 2018 midterms mimicked what happened with Obama in 2008 and 2010. That is, lots of people who backed both candidates for president disengaged from the midterms, leaving the passionate people on the other side to dominate those elections.
For 2020, you know the passionate ones on the left are turning out. The question is whether or not you’ll see a repeat of 2012, when enough non-voters from 2010 returned to give Obama his win over Romney. I think in the cases of a potential flip state like Virginia, the more Democrats at the local level convince themselves the state’s gone permanently Blue and act as though nothing they do legislatively will turn it Red again, the more likely that might happen, because that’s what did happen in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016. Team Hillary thought all the swing states were on the GOP side, and never thought Blue states might flip Red because she had enraged voters (at the same time, if you’re the Trump people, you also can’t assume that PA, MI and WI are locked in for you this November).
I agree totally. What is the compromise if someone is out to destroy you?
Yep, exactly.
The Left is like an infant — loud, prone to tantrums, and driven almost entirely by self-centered emotion. But when that infant picks up Daddy’s loaded gun and starts waving it around erratically, you ignore it at your peril.
Oh the irony: SJWs are, to a large extent, quite foolish. They call for the very disruption of the free society that allows them to call for that destruction. They really do behave like spoiled children.
You mean this one?
Don’t confuse the mob, whether virtual or IRL, with the ideologues and entrepreneurs who lead from behind.
Obama is not a mere child, nor is Warren, nor is Bloomberg, or Soros, or the radicals at Alphabet.
Nor Ocasio-Cortez, for that matter. She is reasonably bright. She reminds me of many young women I know who worked hard in school, and were praised for their performance and skill at regurgitating a grade level (or maybe a grade or two higher) appropriate version of the fake facts and propaganda they were fed. They are true believers. They are excellent employees, who fully embrace the wokeness coming from HR. They are like members of the Red Guard who assiduously memorized the Red Book and the rest of the Party’s teaching; when they are presented with information that provides cognitive dissonance they can be very dangerous.
They become today’s Maenads, which tells us that the cult to which they adhere is probably, despite its Apollonian veneer, Dionysian underneath.
Nah. The one I saw ended after the first paragraph, and there was no picture involved.
I second OntheLeftCoast.
While they may be infantile, most SJW are not children. At least from my point of view, most SJW have fully embraced their insane ideology primarily for social reasons for:
a) On a very superficial level the SJW ideology for the incurious non thinking is obviously right – how could one not support Social Justice, Helping the Poor and Saving the World from Certain Environmental Catastrophe?
b) All their “friends” fervently support the same things so if one were to actually cast doubt on the veracity of the SJW “truths” there is a strong likelihood one would be immediately and harshly cast out of one’s friend group , and believe me from knowing some of those friend groups of my daughter the casting out is really harsh so there is almost a required/imposed conformity to support the SJW belief system.
Agreed. But how?
Every time I bring up a woke outrage against free speech or rights of the accused or just common decency most of my friends (old enough not to be SJW but still residents of Massachusetts) agree about the outrage but think it is just an outlier. They are hardly likely to withdraw their investment from companies with woke policies, tell colleges that practice indoctrination to stuff it, etc.
They remain more afraid of the right than of the left. The women think their sexual freedom is threatened, and the men think the corporations and government are corrupt and the corrupt status quo is defended by the right more than by the left. So on healthcare, the environment, etc. they think the common good is more threatened by right than left. They will never not choose left over right–center or far, it won’t matter.
They should be taken seriously, if for no other reason than that these verminous ideologues do harm peoples’ careers and personal lives. They really are close kin to the people in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and Communist China who got professors fired and then jailed or even killed.
The most aggressively angry of the SJWs tend to mistake intelligence for common sense. They might spend years in college learning how the world should work, but they refuse to acknowledge human nature, the Law of Unintended Consequences, and how things actually do work. So when Progressive Action A naturally produces Unintended Consequence B, their egos prevent them from adjusting to reality.
Ego and lack of common sense makes them think they’re too smart to have their plans fail; therefore people who’ve been warning that the plans will fail must be sabotaging those plans. That leads to doubling down on failure, and trying to eliminate the people opposing you from the political conversation, under the belief that’s going to solve the problem. And when the solutions keep failing, the only answer is to keep eliminating more people, until you get to the level of Cuba and Venezuela, where everything’s fallen apart and even some of your past allies are now eliminated, or working against you.
It’s possible that some think that most SJW’s are children because the street thugs we see are mostly kids. (The older fascists stay behind the scenes, concentrating on organizing and indoctrinating and funding…and presiding over faculty search committees.)
Two relevant questions:
Are there foreign actors who would benefit from the ascent of SJWs, the Green Nude Eel, and the rest of the “Progressive” agenda?
Are they helping the agenda along, or is this all just a coincidence. (Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times…)
It’s a process. People are invested in their world views. It’s a part of their identity and the framework provides stability which helps them cope in an unpredictable world. Because of that, some will never change the way they see things, no matter how much evidence you present them. Those that can change will resist, so it’s still a process — drip, drip, drip, until you hit critical mass.
This is true. They will try to achieve these goals and if they cannot, they will attempt to make the person unhirable or discredit his work. Ask Mark Regnerus or Rod Dreher or Jim Dobson just how seriously they need to be taken. Or Ryan Anderson for that matter.
Agreed. I am dismayed at how many people in the United States have sympathy for socialism. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. What happens in Europe tends to land in the US about fifty or sixty years later. What propelled governments in Europe to embrace socialism is now with this current generation. I would estimate that more than half the Democratic Party would support socialism today. Is it going to get clipped or is it going to continue to sprout? I’m fairly confident that Trump can hold them off in 2020, but I certainly worry about 2024.