RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/woke-is-truly-going-broke/

It looks like Susan Sontag was ahead of her time. Back in 1966, she (in)famously wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” (After her own bout with cancer a few years later she emended that statement, noting that, on reflection, she thought it was unfair — to cancer.)

Back then, such statements were “provocative,” a euphemism for outrageously mendacious. But it wasn’t long before lots of white liberals, abetted by sundry black race-hustlers, got in on the game. To accompany its 1993 biennial exhibition, the Whitney Museum of American Art passed out little pins that said, “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White.” It was fun to watch all the white females in black boots, bad hairdos and ill-fitting clothes trudge scowling through the galleries sporting that declaration of ideological submission.

Nowadays, of course, anti-white animus is all the rage wherever tribal wokeness accumulates and pools. “Critical Race Theory,” which began life in the academy, has metastasized down into primary school, throughout the corporate world and even into various agencies of the federal government where “workshops” (that’s English for what Maoists called “struggle sessions”) are convened to provide cathartic opportunities to declare and abominate one’s “whiteness” and the fifty shades of one’s “privilege.”

Racial aphrodisiacs like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist (in a nutshell, practice anti-white racism) and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism fill the marketplace of stale ideas while Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, skirls about “white rage” and frantic exercises in malicious historical fantasy like the New York Times’s 1619 Project poison the hearts and minds of students across the country.

The Chinese have come up with one of the most penetrating epithets to describe this sickness. In 2010, some clever Chinese coined the term baizuo, which literally means “white left” but really means “sanctimonious liberal dysphoria.” It’s a menu-driven pathology in which, in the words of the political scientist Chenchen Zhang, “hypocritical humanitarians… advocate political correctness just to satisfy their own sense of moral superiority.” A rancid pity is the motor of this enterprise — pity, and an unearned sense of forever unexpiated guilt. “Culpability suits us,” the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner observes, “it provides an alibi for our abdication.”

https://www.tothepointnews.com/2022/05/suffering-the-worthlessness-of-wokeism/

We are witnessing a number of radical military, social, and political revolutions that are changing the United States—and the world—in fundamental ways that we still have not appreciated.

The taboo about never mentioning the first-strike use of nuclear weapons in a major conventional war is now apparently over. Vladimir Putin routinely threatens their use. Communist China hints at its growing nuclear capability and is hell-bent on rushing into production a huge new nuclear missile force. The world is defining nuclear incineration down.

The more China and North Korea talk about nukes, the more necessary it is that uneasy democracies such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will make adjustments. And the more the United States bows out of its prior role of extending its nuclear umbrella over Western democracies, the more likely these societies will consider going nuclear themselves.

Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons—and its patrons Russia and China seem to be ensuring that it will—then the long feared but heretofore never reified nuclear Middle East arms race will finally break out, as the petro-rich Arab world tries to deter Iran’s unhinged theocrats.

There is also a revolutionary vacuum occurring abroad. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are trying to figure out whether there is still any old-style American deterrence, or whether the woke progressives now in power in Washington dislike the customs and traditions of the United States even more than they do.

Lots of disasters have contributed to the current perilous state of affairs, including the precipitous American retreat from and humiliation in Afghanistan. Add in voluntary cutbacks in oil and gas production by the West, and the subsequent embarrassment of a superpower beseeching thuggish regimes such as Venezuela to send us their energy.

The politicized transformation of the U.S. military from a meritocratic force focused on wartime lethality into an extension of the social welfare state driven by diversity, equity and inclusion has encouraged our enemies to take risks they otherwise might not have taken.