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A Letter to My Woke Friends
I don’t buy your narrative that America is a racist country. I think you are ignorant: you have a cramped and impoverished understanding of history, and no sense of proportion. I reject your “white privilege” palaver. I don’t slice and dice my fellow man into little groups based on superficial characteristics, and I won’t claim to know any more about a man based on his skin color than you know about me based on mine.
Diversity and inclusion? You can keep it. Diversity of views is lovely. Diversity of race, sexual orientation, color, and other trivial details of anatomy and preference is a crock. Every man is an identity group of one, so keep your woke bigotry. You obsess about it all you like, but I’m not interested.
I’m far from perfect but I’m free of the sin of which my color, you believe, makes me guilty. I don’t care what you think about it. I’m not joining you in reinventing racism. I want our laws and our public institutions to be color blind, without preference or bias toward any race. Beyond that, every man can decide for himself how noble or petty he wishes to be.
I reject your thesis, I reject your claim to moral superiority, I reject your demands and your obsession with identity, and I reject your efforts to reinvigorate racism. I don’t take you seriously, and I’m not going to pretend that I take you seriously.
Published in Culture
Extremely likely, I think.
Traditional American morality — on issues of marriage, child-bearing within marriage, hard work, education, and avoiding crime — were spot-on. This was even true on issues of race. The problem through the 1950s/1960s was not a failure of race-neutral values, but a failure in implementing this value, which had been present since the founding.
I guess that depends some on perspective. It seems like the traditional American orthodoxy on child labor, for example, needed some work.
Traditional Orthodoxy on child labor didn’t handle the Industrial Age well. I’m not so sure familial labor was the problem in there.
As it is, compulsory education and non productive children aren’t really proving to be a utopian panacea either.
Children from poor families resent their inability to materially help their parents and unproductive kids have created unproductive adults.
Great fight until we are all dead. We are still all dead.
I have been fighting, and doing a good job, and getting on with life, and guess what? It does not matter at all. The system is still screwing me over. I am going to be unemployed again, 4th time in less than 4 years. Maybe I can get a job and lose it before the fall and it can be 5 times in 4 years. Hard work, dedication, all that jazz means nothing anymore. The American dream is dead.
I have no hope, Sir, and no reason to hope. I have nothing but a series of defeats personally, and we have nothing but defeats politically. You want me to have hope? Please explain, Sir, exactly how we fight and win. Even at the Alamo they knew that by losing the battle they were winning the war.
Asian-Americans believe that 2 + 2 = 4. Only racist whites believe that 2 +2 = 4. Therefore, Asian-Americans will be back to “adjacent-White” in a couple of days.
The Establishment is Woke. We see a lot of racists ruling various institutions these days. In my more optimistic moments I’m inclined to think it’s the last gasp of the ideology. But then I remember that human nature is never-changing, just the fashions of the moment and accretion of technology and information (if retained and promulgated).
One of the biggest problems with Woke is Cancel Culture. I think one of the biggest faults of Cancel culture is the underlying premise that if someone is wrong about one thing (even if it’s a spurious charge) then they are wrong about everything. They are second class, or less than human. Not only is there no opportunity for Grace (to give or receive), but it is literally impossible for a large heterogeneous society to adhere under those conditions. Live and Let Live, the traditional American ethos, is replaced by authoritarian orthodoxy.
In building on Glenn Reynolds excellent NY Post article about the proper treatment of the Woke demons amongst us I am inclined to the following rebuttal to any race-monger:
I used an ad hoc, shorter variant of this on a nice Liberal Establishmentarian of some professional accomplishment when he went started to go on about BLM and Equity vs. Equality. He was utterly shocked and speechless, especially because I did include the wrong side of history part. It was said with a smile and an acknowledgment of his area of expertise, but I think it may have made him think. Maybe/maybe-not.
However, this approach does provide a face-saving exit from the Woke cul-de-sac. Maybe not right away. Maybe not for everyone. But some. And that helps build the small battalions that eventually win.
Rod Dreher covers the “monk angle” in “The Benedict Option”http://www.moosetracksblog.com/2018/02/the-benedict-option-rod-dreher.html
You live in a country with 50 sovereign states. Many will start returning to their sovereignty. The left owns the culture but not the land
The Gov of South Dakota caved on a bill to stop men competing against women. If she cannot stand tall, no one can.
We can fight. The left won’t accept a surrender. If they would that might have been a strategy, but at best that just means they will kill you later and the normal course of action is for them to just kill you immediately and be done with you. There is no negotiation room left at the moment. They want everything and to destroy you most of all, since most of us aren’t willing to be destroyed fighting is the only option.
Concise, to the point, and irrefutable. Pardon me while I share the hell out of this.
I find it very hard to believe that you have woke friends Henry.
Right? Many of my friends are well to the left of me, and a few of them are full-on woke, but we get along just fine. I want to attribute it to my charming personality, but my role as the always-sober designated driver certainly has something to do with it. (Also, I’m the first person people call when they have to move furniture.)
Because they all have Prius-es?
Intersectionality solves nothing. That is why they promote it.
They CLAIM it does. That it actually doesn’t, is no different than so much else of the Left.
They don’t claim it solves anything at all. That is why there is no redemption contained within CRT / intersectionality. It solves no problem, they claim it explains why racial disparities exist – but only if they ignore Asian-American success.
None of your woke frinds will listen.
You want em to hope? Fine. Map it out. How do we get our country back? What are the steps? Spell it out.
The military is busy attacking Tucker Carlson. The Court is about to be packed. HR 1 will be the law of the land. They will van our guns.
It. Is. Over. Actually change mind instead of telling me to fight.
7… 8… 9… 10.
Hi Bryan.
I think you’re mistaken about the “It. Is. Over.” part. I think what is required is that normal people, whom I believe are the sizeable majority of the nation, become emboldened to speak up against radical nonsense. I think that we encourage that behavior by doing it ourselves — by standing up and saying “Enough! This is preposterous. I don’t believe you, I reject your moral authority, and I deny your moral right to condemn me. Respectfully, go to hell.”
The opposite of what we need is to say “It. Is. Over. We have lost. It’s done.” That seems to do no one any good — though it may be satisfying in some unhappy way.
My point is that I think the sine qua non is that we push back, verbally, publicly, emphatically. That doesn’t mean taking arms or demonstrating or whatever you consider “fighting.” Not now. It means reclaiming the narrative, telling the woke mob that we won’t simply cave to its demands, and pressing on — even if it means taking some personal loss in the process.
I just don’t see the virtue in admitting defeat, and don’t understand why some seem so eager to embrace it. I think it’s counter-productive. We should be encouraging people to stand up to the bullies.
H.
Reminds me of Star Trek, of course:
None of my business but you appear to be advocating for acquiescence in slavery which, I suppose, is something everyone will make their own choice about.
If the Dims are successful with HR1 then, it appears to me, that Conservatives will be splitting up. One side will want to continue talking; the other will be mimicking groups such as the IRA.
So I ask for a pathway to victory and you give me the don’t give up speech.
I want the road map to victory. That has to be more than “speak up”. You first. I have a family to feed.
Bigger picture, the left controls everything. What is the plan to get it back? Don’t tell me just to hope. I am offering you the opportunity to change my mind.
To use an analogy, you are telling me to calm down. Instead, tell me why it will work out. What is the game plan coach?
I’ll make it easy. After HR1 passes, how do we get people elected? Or, after they pass their gin control bill, how do we keep our guns?
Masterpiece cake is being sued again. Can’t say that looks like winning.
Bryan, I feel your frustration. Don’t fix your spelling, either. It’s perfect the way it is.
(Prohibition didn’t work in the 20s either.)
Well for one thing, I’ve long believed it was a mistake to get an official concealed-carry permit. That just gives them more evidence of where to confiscate. And that’s on top of thinking people should do private sales to start with, no federal paper trail. Or at least buy your guns right before you move to a different state, ideally several states away.
I don’t see where you get that. Giving into slavery? I am calling for realism. You people would have been arguing for reconciliation with England in the fall of 1775.
I’m not giving you the “don’t give up” speech, Bryan. It’s pretty clear that you’ve given up already; I’m just saying that I think it’s counter-productive for you to go on about it. As I’ve said before, I wish you folks who consider it lost would do so in private, because it’s demoralizing to the rest of us.
But, okay, it’s a free country and I value free speech.
I’m not telling you “just to hope.” For goodness sake, read what I’ve written. I’m telling you to speak up, to argue with liberals, to scoff at the trans movement and call it out for blend of fad and mental health issues it is. Get on Facebook and Twitter and Ricochet and MeWe and CloutHub and Parler and tell people that you don’t accept the America-is-a-racist-country tripe, that you believe BLM and Antifa are the bad guys, and that socialism is stupid and evil and a complete failure and people who try to sell it are ignoramuses.
Don’t “calm down.” Do the opposite: get in-your-face about this. Lose a few friends because you say unpleasant things. Get blocked by some people. Earn critical comments from a few people in public because you point out that the Emperor is naked.
I don’t think we should be engaging in civil disobedience. I don’t think we should be taking up arms. I do think we should be buying guns and ammunition, because that’s just common sense — consider doing that, if you haven’t already. I do think we should be on several social media platforms mansplaining to as many as we can reach why national boundaries matter and the issue of crime in our black communities transcends race and how we’ve overreacted to the Wuhan coronavirus and why election integrity matters and how the current president is illegitimate because he was elected through press fraud if not outright voter fraud but maybe voter fraud as well.
Speaking of mansplaining, I think we should make it a point to say that there are two sexes and that they’re different, and that we’ll use whatever pronouns we damn well please because this is America, dammit, and NO ONE tells us what to say.
I don’t think we should be going on about how it’s lost and it’s over and they’re going to take our votes and our guns and they control everything and they’ve won and what’s the point.
But, like I said, it’s a free country. Go right ahead if that’s what you feel you need to do. And I’ll go on trying to be reasonably patient with it. But it’s hard, Ringo. It’s hard.
You clearly juts don’t get it.
The very fact I cannot say more of what I want to in this post proves my point. What you advocate is simply not an option for me.
We have a lot of people who post under a fake name, because to be found out would be to lose their jobs and careers. What do you risk by following your path? A few friends? People have families to feed. This is how the left has won.
“we people”? That’s not what I said at all. Since I’m not in the business of changing minds, I think I’ll end my involvement with this thread…
You accused me of giving in to being a slave. That is not what I said at all.
I should not lump you in with Henry though, you are correct. I was reacting to the first part.