During an appearance on Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcast on Monday, famed Democrat strategist James Carville described the “identity left” as “goofy” and blamed “overeducated, cultural, white liberals” for ruining everything.
“I find the left to be just annoying,” Carville said before describing the “Western far left” as “habitually the most stupid, naive people you can imagine. They come up with these goofy constructs.”
Psychological dysfunction is now valorized and embedded in our institutions. We need to understand what we’re dealing with.
There is a creeping sense that our society has turned upside-down. Healthy debate is replaced by activist hysterics. Speech is declared violence; violence is excused as speech. Masculinity is condemned as “toxic,” while men in dresses are celebrated in the public square. It feels as if we are in the midst of a society-wide mental breakdown.
Progressive ideology has turned UK law enforcement into a woke farce
A few weeks ago, a story made headlines that outraged civil liberties advocates and critics of state over-reach. It revealed how much the British police have sunk into farce. A teenage girl with autism had been dragged from her home and arrested by a group of police officers after she said a female police officer looked like her lesbian grandmother. Well, the same force involved in this shocking display of state power – West Yorkshire Police – has done it again.
They’re indicative of society’s and individuals’ flight from reason into fantasy and self-destruction.
The “disease” of “hysteria” was the scourge of the front parlors and hospitals of the European elite in the 19th century. Even Sigmund Freud had a conflicted diagnostic go at hysteria. It was in the medical textbooks, in the meetings of surgeons and head shrinks, in the broadsheets, and in the minds and conversations of many a concerned lady. Fees for services flowed into the purses of medical practitioners — and doubtless also some quacks who worked to seek a cure for the overwrought ladies, inside and out, and rid them of the terrible hysteria menace.
There are two dishonest conversations about wokeness, or identity politics if you prefer the less contentious term. The first from conservatives is wearily familiar. For some on the right, ‘woke’ is now a synonym for ‘anything I can’t abide’. Overuse has made the insult meaningless.
On the left, the dishonesty lies in the denial that a new ideology even exists. Nothing has changed, we are told. To be what Conservatives sneeringly call ‘woke’ is simply to be a decent person who cares about the rights of others as progressives have always done.
“They’re calling you ‘woke’ if you call out bad things,’ cried the actress, Kathy Burke. ‘If you’re not racist, you’re woke. If you’re not homophobic, oh, you’re woke. Be woke, kids. Be woke. Be wide awake and fucking call it out.’
The extent to which radical gender and race ideology is imposed on the Civil Service has been laid bare by a dossier of internal communications leaked to The Telegraph.
Staff in Government departments are being taught about gender ideology, which affirms the idea that people can choose their gender, while those with legally protected gender critical beliefs, who believe that you cannot change your biological sex, say they are bullied into silence.
At least in previous centuries a trail of smoke loitered in the air after the censors were done burning books. The smell of information dying could not be escaped, nor could the haze be hidden.
In the digital era, information is deleted and edited by millions of invisible hands. Entire works of fiction are rewritten by publishing houses given custody of their survival, while historical records are misplaced if they invalidate the ‘current thing’. One wonders how much we have lost in the last 5 years…
These are dangerous times for knowledge.
Penzeys Spices wants Republicans to know that they’re the “#1 threat to this country.”
I maintain an ever-growing list of woke companies on my website to help consumers make informed decisions. About half of the companies on the list are there based on reader suggestions. I get a lot of spicy feedback, but I never could have imagined that a reader tip could inspire me to proclaim Penzeys, a retail spice chain, America’s wokest company. That’s right, Penzeys—not Ben & Jerry’s, not Patagonia, not Disney, not Nike. Penzeys Spices. Here’s why.
Global progressive leaders join Trudeau at Montreal summit to discuss threats to democracy, human rights
Tony Blair and British Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer are among a group of global figures set to attend a summit with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Montreal this weekend, in what is being seen as a show of strength of the centre left.
Among the issues to be discussed at the 2023 Global Progress Action Summit, which will also be attended by former prime ministers Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, Sanna Marin of Finland and Magdalena Andersson of Sweden, are the rise of the right around the world and threats to democracy and human rights, including women’s rights.
The new James Bond may be progressive, but the army certainly isn’t
Charlie Higson’s new Bond novel On His Majesty’s Secret Service provoked incredulity and scorn last week, for depicting Bond as a kimchi-eating Centrist Dad and the villain as the Ukipper-on-steroids “Aethelstan”. This in turn prompted a flurry of debate about whether a woke Bond is plausible. Meanwhile, reports this week of a PTSD camp for veterans seemingly operated by the real-world “Aethelstan” offer a tantalising counterargument.
The near-universal loathing for Charlie Higson’s new Bond novel has restored my faith in humanity.
Last week on X (formerly known as Twitter), Ed West, journalist and eternal Eeyore of the British right, shared a few pages from the latest James Bond novel. He included no prompts to indicate how we should feel about it, or indeed why he had thought it worth bringing to our attention. But the derision it drew was immediate. The consensus was overwhelming: it was tripe.
A wealthy Chicago suburb has been forced to cancel a ‘poverty simulation’ event following furious backlash for hosting it at a country club.
The City of Highland Park, Illinois partnered with The Alliance for Human Services and several other community organizations to put on the event which was scheduled for Saturday at the Highland Park Country Club.
The goal was to increase residents’ understanding of what it is like to live in poverty – with the original event description reading: ‘Participants are put into situations in which they do not have enough resources and are forced to make difficult choices that can negatively impact them and their families.’
Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr, Biden’s nominee to replace Milley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had signed off on a memo to impose a 43% quota for white male officers in the Air Force. That would be catastrophic at a time when the Air Force is struggling with recruitment, faces a shortage of over 1,000 pilots and 86% of its pilots are white men.
A 73-year-old woman has been questioned at her home by English police because she took a picture of a sticker. This was months after the Conservative government said it was “deeply concerned about reports of the police wrongly getting involved in lawful debate in this country”—a message that has been clearly ignored.
The pensioner, who worked as a social worker before retiring, took a picture of a sticker reading “Keep males out of women-only spaces,” according to The Daily Telegraph. The sticker had been affixed to a pro-transgender poster branding the slogan: “Stand by your trans.”
A climate change scientist has claimed the world’s leading academic journals reject papers which don’t ‘support certain narratives’ about the issue and instead favor ‘distorted’ research which hypes up dangers rather than solutions.
Patrick T. Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and doctor of earth and climate sciences, said editors at Nature and Science – two of the most prestigious scientific journals – select ‘climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives’.
In an article for The Free Press, Brown likened the approach to the way ‘the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause’ of wildfires, including the recent devastating fires in Hawaii. He pointed out research that said 80 percent of wildfires are ignited by humans.
