Stump the right-winger

Who the heck is Bethany Mandel? I had to look her up on Wikipedia to find out: she’s a conservative pundit, one of those weird libertarian goons.

She transferred to Rutgers University in 2005 for its strong Jewish Studies department and Jewish student community, and worked full-time while a full-time student, graduating in 2008 with a degree in history and Jewish studies. During her college years, she adopted conservative views after finding that Medicaid and other government welfare programs she had expected to help her after her mother’s death were inefficient and ineffective, objecting to the idea that as someone who had grown up in poverty, she had any ‘white privilege,’ as well as due to the influence of college friends and the writings of Ayn Rand.

She has recently written a book titled Stolen Youth, about how the left is waging an all-out battle on the American family, particularly the youngest members. If they can make our children miserable, lead them to question every building block of society, and rebuild their entire concept of reality, then the left and their woke indoctrinators will consider that a victory. Right. That kind of popular right wing fanatic.

I don’t have any sympathy for the kind of fame she’s getting right now. She was being interviewed, and was asked to define “woke”. Watch her brain short circuit — it’s quick.


“Woke” is the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression

She did manage to scrape up a very bad definition: “woke” is not about being aware of systemic bias, it’s about creating hierarchies of oppression, which is kind of the absolute opposite of the idea. No wonder she hates it!

That’s a good way to handle these clowns: just ask them to define what they’re railing against, and either they’re going to give an accurate definition (as Desantis did, “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them”), which made him look like a hateful idiot for opposing it, or they have to invent a fake definition (like Mandel, the need to reimagine society in order to create hierarchies of oppression) and look like an ignorant idiot.

Good work, Briahna Joy Gray. You made that skewering look effortless.

“woke”

The most useful thing about the word “woke” is that it allows me to instantly recognize the lying idiots. All these conservatives complaining about “wokeism”…it’s like they’ve tattooed “LOSER” on their foreheads, and they’re proud of it.

Ron Desantis, of all people, gave the game away when his lawyers had to explicitly define “woke”, and this is what they came up with.

Asked what “woke” means more generally, [Desantis’ General Counsel Ryan] Newman said “it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

Newman added that DeSantis doesn’t believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S.

That’s a fine definition, and that Desantis “doesn’t believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S.” confirms my opinion that those who use the word disparagingly are all lying idiots.

I am surprised and reassured to learn that I’m not some weird outlier in this, as well: in one poll, a majority agree that “woke” is not an insult.

Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on “woke,” but a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word as a positive attribute, not a negative one.

Fifty-six percent of those surveyed say the term means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” That includes not only three-fourths of Democrats but also more than a third of Republicans.

Overall, 39% say instead that the word reflects what has become the GOP political definition, “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words.” That’s the view of 56% of Republicans.

I disagree that it’s a mistake for Republicans to abuse the term, since a majority of them think it’s a synonym for “politically correct.” It’s a rallying cry used to gather all the lying idiots under the banner of whatever yahoo is running for office, and in that sense it’s effective, as long as you don’t mind using language dishonestly and misrepresenting what people actually think.

I find it a handy flag to recognize that someone doesn’t believe systemic injustices exist, and that they sure don’t feel any need to oppose injustice, because they think everything is hunky dory, and we should just maintain the status quo. It certainly has made it fast and easy to spot bad people to block on social media.

But here, I’ve got a video from Cody Johnston that explains the whole absurd, horrible situation at length, almost an hour of length. It’s an entertaining and theatrical and detailed hour, though, so you might enjoy it more than my cursory dismissal of anyone who thinks “woke” is a bad thing.

I’m invited!

The Board of Regents is visiting campus, and I found this invitation slipped under my office door. (Not from the Regents, obviously.)

This is clearly a dig at a certain regent who made some stupid comments. I’d like to go, except…

  1. My attendance would contribute nothing to diversity
  2. Nobody from the Board of Regents will bother to show up
  3. That’s my birthday! Can’t I find a better way to celebrate it?

My counterarguments would be…

  1. But it would show that even old white men support diversity
  2. I care what the students think, not the Board of Regents
  3. No.

I guess that’s my Thursday evening planned out then.

You knew this combo was coming

Scott Adams makes a blatantly racist rant and his comic strip is dropped from a large number of newspapers; guess who rushes to defend him? That privileged child of apartheid, Elon Musk.

Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams, the under-fire creator of “Dilbert,” in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip after Adams said that White people should “get the hell away from Black people.”

Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

That is the least surprising alliance since the Rome-Berlin Axis.

Well, I guess we all have to start reading Dilbert, since Elon says so.

Hmmm, I was right?

I said we should cancel Scott Adams, and gosh, look what happened: people spoke up all across the country, and Scott Adams was canceled.

Newspapers across the United States have pulled Scott Adams’s long-running “Dilbert” comic strip after the cartoonist called Black Americans a “hate group” and said White people should “get the hell away from” them.

I guess it’s easy to be a prophet when you predict the obvious stuff.

One could argue that this means Adams will be whining indignantly about injustice and those damned libs some more, but that’s fine, he has free speech, he can complain all he wants, I simply won’t be hearing about it and can take some satisfaction in the fact that he won’t be making as much money off his bigotry anymore.

Tomorrow is a “Day of Hate”

There’s nothing anyone can do about it, I guess, but anti-semitic, that is, NAZI organizers are telling their followers to carry out acts of harassment against Jewish people on Saturday. The police are just warning you all — you’re on your own, nothing they can do.

Chicago police are urging Jewish and other religious communities to be extra vigilant this weekend when a neo-Nazi group has declared a “day of hate.”

“At this time, there is no actionable intelligence,” the Chicago Police Department said in a statement. “We continue to actively monitor the situation.”

In New York, the police will have “elevated situational awareness”, but otherwise, it’s on you to be careful.

In the warning, the NYPD advised officers to maintain “elevated situational awareness” on Saturday, particularly at locations that “might garner higher interest from these types of actors.”

What good are the police, then? Once the bodies have bled out, then they can step in? I have noticed that the police are pretty darned good at making life miserable for black people, harassing them with frequent traffic stops, hassling them on street corners, threatening them with arrest for trivial actions, even too often outright killing them — I don’t want cops murdering skinheads either, but it seems to be easier to stroll around with a swastika tattoo than the unadorned skin a black person is born with. The police have the tools, they use them when they wish, but apparently, they don’t wish to crack down on white people threatening violence to other citizens.

In addition to the uselessness of cops, do these Nazis have even an ounce of introspection? Declaring a “Day of Hate” really ought to be enough for any normal person to realize that they are the baddies. The very baddest baddies. I guess the fact that they’re wearing swastika arm bands should have been the first clue, but they ignored that and are just going to run all the way to beating up little old Jewish ladies in the street, because they generically hate them.

Cancel Scott Adams

Fuck both those guys

That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? We have the power to somehow, in some way cancel people for being, for instance, racist as hell. So get to work! Chant the magic words, wave your fairy wands, summon the spirits of expulsion, whatever, and banish Scott Adams to some pit on the fringes of Sheol. He’s the face of bland, casual, rich white person racism.

I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people, the 65-year-old author exclaimed. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.

Reiterating that whites need to escape, Adams said that he had already done so by moving to an area with a very low Black population. He then cited Black CNN anchor Don Lemon to justify his assertion that there’s a correlation between a mostly Black neighborhood and a bunch of problems he didn’t see in majority-white areas.

So I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore, Adams huffed. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. So I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.

He continued: The only outcome is I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re white. It’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying.

This rant was prompted, he claims, by a survey that showed that the phrase “It’s OK to be white” was considered racist by almost half of black people. How considerate of Adams to immediately confirm that opinion.

If we can’t “cancel” Scott Adams, then “canceling” is a toothless, imaginary threat. The difficulty lies in the fact that Adams is rich, his comic makes lots of money for a tangle of distributors (Andrews McMeel Syndication, Universal Uclick, GoComics, etc.), and all you have to do is look at the comics page of any newspaper to see that this is an industry locked in to nearly permanent frozen rigidity. Adams knows this. He can afford to be smug and safe and bigoted.

He can be pulled by individual newspaper chains, though.

Amid the incorporation of the anti-”woke” plot lines, Dilbert was dropped last September from 77 newspapers by publisher Lee Enterprises. Adams, for his part, claimed the move “was part of a larger overhaul” of comic syndication. At the same time, however, he also said it’s “possible” the strip was pulled for other reasons.

I suspect that all we can do is recognize that Adams is a front for racism, and while we can’t do anything about him, we certainly can judge our friends and family who post Dilbert comics on their office door and send them around via Facebook. That’s all “canceling” is, anyway.

Where do Nazis come from, Mommy?

If I had to guess, I would have figured they were hatched out of the slimy runoff from a sewage treatment plant, but no! There are people who take little kids and teach to be Nazis! It’s an online school, of course, titled “Dissident Homeschool.”

“It is up to us to ensure our children know him for the deceitful, dishonest, riot-inciting negro he actually was,” the administrator of the network’s Telegram channel wrote, alongside a downloadable lesson plan for elementary school children. ”He is the face of a movement which ethnically cleansed whites out of urban areas and precipitated the anti-white regime that we are now fighting to free ourselves from.”

Since the group began in October 2021 it has openly embraced Nazi ideology and promoted white supremacy, while proudly discouraging parents from letting their white children play with or have any contact with people of any other race. Admins and members use racist, homophobic, and antisemitic slurs without shame, and quote Hitler and other Nazi leaders daily in a channel open to the public.

One problem here is that we’ve been steadily degrading the meaning of the word “school”. When I was a kid I had a relative who bought a house and set up a “school” to teach the principles of the John Birch Society — at that point, you had to have some kind of facility and had to fill out some paperwork in order to shovel your garbage into children’s heads. He was only able to poison the brains of a small number of families, but nowadays, anyone can assemble a pile of bullshit, call it an online school, and spew it out through a channel on Telegram, and amplify the signal. “Dissident Homeschool” has 2400 members! We can at least hope many of them are critics tracking the nonsense, and that some of those families are treating it as supplemental and also sending their kids to a real school.

The “Dissident Homeschool” network is run by a husband and wife team who use the aliases “Mr. and Mrs. Saxon.” This week the antifascist research group Anonymous Comrades Collective published a detailed report that unmasked the Saxons as Logan and Katja Lawrence, who live in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, with their four young children.

Oops. I doxxed the Nazis! No regrets.

Lawrence expanded on her view on why she wanted to educate her children at home. “We have our children’s best interest at heart and nobody can do a better job than we can because it’s our child. We are so deeply invested into making sure that that child becomes a wonderful Nazi,” she said.

There are no good Nazis.

The Right Stuff and the National Justice League were described by the Anti-Defamation League as “virulently antisemitic”, while 31 members of Patriot Front were arrested last year inside a U-haul truck on their way to an LGBTQ Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, carrying shields and smoke grenades.

Yet Katja attempts to describe these group’s activities as entirely wholesome.

If your agenda involves treating a significant proportion of the population as degenerate and evil on the basis of irreverent criteria like the color of their skin, you aren’t “wholesome”.

We really need better enforcement of rules defining what constitutes a school, preferably one that establishes a required curriculum, but the combination of Republicans trying to carve up educational funding for their own selfish benefit, and religious groups demanding special privileges to indoctrinate their dogma means all these gaps and loopholes form that allow Nazis to burrow in and thrive.

They get away with it because they can get away with it

I find this jarringly horrible. Some people in Florida are driving around in a truck projecting Nazi imagery on buildings.

They also put up messages, like “Kanye was right about the Jews,” but showing a swastika intertwined with a cross is particularly revealing. Christian nationalism, anti-Semitism, blatant bigotry, all proudly displayed, and no one is doing anything about it. Try to do that in my neighborhood, and I’d be part of the mob taking bats to the projector and flipping the truck over.

What mystifies me is that there are subsets of the population in the US that revere Nazis and don’t react to this kind of hate speech with the kind of shuddering revulsion I feel. This is evil stalking our streets. It should not be tolerated, and the people perpetrating it need to understand the visceral disgust they trigger in others.

Unfortunately, these people are also close kin to all the rabid conservatives who hate “wokeness”.