John McWhorter How ‘Woke’ Became an Insult

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/opinion/woke-politically-correct.html

If you’re subscribing to my newsletter, you likely already know that I am a linguist who writes books and articles about the joys and mysteries of language. Others likely know that I write about race in America. Some of you know that I switch hit between both and sometimes combine the two. In my newsletter I’ll also be pitching in about music and other things that occupy me from week to week.

But for this first edition, I have chosen a subject that brings together the two things I get to write about most: language and race. Namely, just what has happened to “woke” lately?

It seems it was 10 minutes ago that it was the hot new badge of enlightenment, shared warmly as a kind of lexical bonding ritual, usually in the expression “stay woke.” To be woke was to be in on a leftist take on how American society operates, especially in reference to the condition of Black America and the role of systemic racism within it.

In 2012, people were using “stay woke” on Twitter with unalloyed pride. As late as 2016, you could find rosy-cheeked teens and 20-somethings all but chirping “woke,” such as in this earnest little guide to the latest slang.

No more. These days, “woke” is said with a sneer. It’s a prisoner in scare quotes as often as not (“Why ‘wokeness’ is the biggest threat to Democrats in the 2022 election”) and typically uttered with a note of condescension somewhere between the way comedians used to talk about hippies and the way anybody talks about, well, rather than a word beginning with “a” you’ll find discussed, among other places, here, I will sub in “jerks.”

The first thing that happened to “woke” was that it was borrowed from Black slang. It first appeared in neither a BuzzFeed article nor a rap but a jolly piece on Black vernacular expressions in 1962 in this newspaper called “If You’re Woke, You Dig It.” Many will be surprised that “salty,” as in “irritable,” another Black expression that white people have taken on of late, also occurs in this piece.

By the time something hits the page, we can be sure it had been around long before, and it’s a good guess that Black people had been using “woke” for at least a couple of decades before this. Lead Belly gives us a look at its likely origins when he urges people to “stay woke” in an afterpiece remark on a 1938 recording. He is referring to Black people being alert to actual physical danger; it would have been a natural evolution to start using “stay woke” to refer to more, as we say, systemic matters.

It was after 2010 that “woke” jumped the fence into mainstream parlance. Erykah Badu’s “Master Teacher” seems to have at least planted a seed, and then those “stay woke” salutes on Twitter in 2012 were in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing, upon which the expression was truly set in stone.

There are those who will see the story of “woke,” therefore, as one of cultural appropriation. But that’s a narrow take. To refer to its uptake by whites as a kind of theft is one way to see it. But another way is to marvel at how bizarre it would have been as recently as the 1980s for white progressives to warmly embrace a term from the Black street as a sign of empathy with Black America’s problems — and as for the theft, Black English is mighty enough that legions of its slang words and expressions stay quite unappropriated, thank you very much. Clearly we can spare one or two now and then? In the meantime, while racism’s persistence is clear, people who like and at least halfway understand one another will talk like one another.

Can the Biden presidency last much longer? By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/can_the_biden_presidency_last_much_longer.html

Democrats now understand that Biden has poisoned the Democrat brand, as proven by a shocking special election flip of a seat in a wealthy suburban district that Biden won by 25 points.

Though removal from office once was unthinkable, Joe Biden has lost the support of most of the key actors whose support helped him win the presidency, and whose cooperation is essential to maintaining the illusion that he is capable of fulfilling the duties of president of the United States.

Because impeachment or the 25th Amendment removal from office would hinge on their support — Democrat officeholders now understand that they are at risk of losing their next election thanks to his sullying of the brand of the party that foisted an already senile placeholder on the public.  In a special election Tuesday, voters in Connecticut’s 26th Senate District, who supported Biden by a 25-point margin, flipped a seat to the Republican candidate (hat tip: Christina Laila).

This is one of the wealthiest suburban constituencies in the country, encompassing Greenwich, Stamford, and New Canaan — people who read the New York Times and who care about foreign policy.

The earlier switch of affluent suburbanites away from Republicans over the past decade or more has been essential to Democrat victories in many blue states.  They believed media propaganda that Trump was an ignorant buffoon whose incompetence made America a laughingstock in the European countries they like to vacation in.  When they see headlines like this, even more such voters will be alarmed:

Biden’s Press Conference Was a Feast of Disinformation Americans are forming the indelible impression that this president is incompetent Charles Lipson

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/biden-press-conference-feast-disinformation/

Biden emerged from his cave, saw his shadow, and told us there will be three more years of winter.

That winter, descending upon America’s position in the world, was on public display at Biden’s Friday press conference about Afghanistan. It was a feast of disinformation.

No al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? Come on, man.

Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are enemies? Gimme a break.

Almost no one thought the Afghan army would fall apart this quickly? You might want to check your notes.

Our Nato allies agreed his decision to withdraw was wise? Ain’t so. Our most important allies are taking the very rare step of publicly blaming an American president.

We’ll know if terrorist groups form in Afghanistan because we have “over the horizon” capabilities? Over the rainbow is more accurate. We need resources on the ground to understand what’s happening.

And on and on and on with drivel and falsehoods.

How bad is this mess? So bad and so obvious that even the mainstream media, lap dogs for the last two years, began asking Biden tough questions. It’s unclear if they will follow up and inform the public about the deceptions, as well as the incompetence and bad judgment.

Yesterday, Juan Williams said the American people will soon forget this failure in Afghanistan. Not very likely. A friend of mine, reflecting on those pictures from the Kabul airport, rendered a much more profound judgment, “People cannot unsee those images.”

Afghanistan’s Tragic Collapse And The Death Of U.S. Influence

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/19/afghanistan-the-ugly-aftermath-and-the-death-of-u-s-influence/

It’s one thing to lose a war intentionally, quite another to botch it so badly that it damages our relations around the world. But thanks to the epic ineptitude of the Biden administration, our military leaders and dysfunctional intelligence agencies, that’s exactly what has happened.

The news couldn’t be more depressing. Our president’s response was, no joke, a strongly worded letter to the Taliban from our United Nations ambassador. At the same time, our own State Department informed U.S. citizens now stuck in the capital of Kabul that they should make their way to Karzai Airport if they can, but that the U.S. can’t guarantee their safety.

Even as the horrible images of the Taliban’s takeover come tumbling in over social media and news sites, the harm to the U.S. and its global reputation has been significant.

The Taliban has already started killing people, including a woman for not wearing a burka, while making up more comprehensive death lists of those who will be summarily murdered once it takes total control.

Here’s how the London Times describes the mayhem:

Despite pledges to be magnanimous, the Taliban have been accused of beheading prisoners, gouging out eyes and executing hundreds. Fleeing civilians have brought tales of girls forced into marriage or kidnapped as sex slaves. Video on social media shows Islamists pumping machine gun rounds into the bodies of captured Afghan policemen.

This is what the Biden administration’s ineptitude hath wrought. Now add to that the hundreds of Americans and other Westerners now stranded and cut off from leaving after Kabul’s main airport came under Taliban control “unexpectedly.”

America the Indispensable Joel Kotkin Joel Kotkin

https://quillette.com/2021/08/18/america-the-indispensable/

Post-millennium America does not look good at a glance. The country has struggled with the pandemic and with deepening divisions over race, class, inequality, and culture. It is in the humiliating process of losing another war, this time in Afghanistan. Since 2016, the world’s largest economy has been presided over first by the buffoonish and occasionally deranged Donald Trump, and then by an aging Joe Biden who bears scant resemblance to Franklin Roosevelt.

Yet, despite its manifest failings—the assault on the Capitol by Trump’s supporters was not a good image builder—the US remains the indispensable country, the last major counterforce to the rising authoritarian challenge of China, and its growing list of allies, including perhaps the new Islamist regime in Kabul. It remains, without question, the only nation with the natural resources, population, military, and technical skill to rally the West and salvage its threatened legacy.

The US routinely rises to the challenge late, a pattern evident in both World Wars, the initial period of the Cold War, the response to China’s late 20th century industrial juggernaut, and the terrorist threat. But in the end, it remains a huge and blessed land with enormous sokojikara, or “reserve power,” as Japanese political scientist Fuji Kamiya described it decades ago, that allows it to overcome competitors.

The case for America

Pessimism about America’s direction has resurged, following a brief improvement when Biden became president. According to an ABC/Ipsos poll, Americans’ optimism about the country’s direction has dropped 20 points since May. Concern is growing that the country is in a  precipitous decline, something that won’t improve with the bleak images from the Afghani debacle. Most Europeans believe that China will soon replace America as the world’s economic powerhouse. The Chinese, unsurprisingly, seem to feel the same. In a since-deleted tweet, Ministry official Zhao Lijian described Western efforts to slow China’s dominion as being “as stupid as Don Quixote versus the windmills … China’s win is unstoppable.”

So will our children—now living in unhappy and increasingly divided societies—grow up kowtowing to the Mandarins? Without America, that’s the future for the West and everyone else. Europe, politically divided, demographically stagnant, and anti-American, lacks the capacity and willingness to resist. Germany appears unwilling to stand up to either its largest trading partner, China, or to its now-favored supplier of energy, Russia. Weaker European states, such as Italy, the Czech Republic, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, and even rightwing favorite Hungary have signed up to be cogs in China’s “Belt and Road initiative.” Asia’s democracies can’t hack it without America. Japan is a rich but aging country that lacks much forward momentum, something that can also be said of South Korea. India is still too poor and chaotic to match China’s regimented power.

‘Hero of Two Worlds’ Review: Lafayette’s Crossing The freedom-loving Marquis de Lafayette tried to import the ideals of the American revolution to his native France. By Mark G. Spencer

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hero-of-two-worlds-review-lafayette-american-revolution-11629475529?mod=article_inline

Most readers of The Wall Street Journal will recognize Lafayette by name. One of the few non-Americans counted among the heroes of the Revolution, dozens of American towns, counties and streets are named for him. But what of the niceties of the Marquis’s eventful life, spanning 1757 to 1834? Those who take up Mike Duncan’s comprehensive, birth-to-death biography will find this French-born nobleman, soldier and statesman to be a fascinating and paradoxical character. Fusing revolutionary energy with a tendency to seek moderation, even compromise, he was as extraordinary as the times in which he lived.

Mr. Duncan—famous for his podcasts “The History of Rome” and “Revolutions”—is the bestselling author of “The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic.” Now, in the three-part doorstopper “Hero of Two Worlds” he shows how a youthful, “restlessly defiant” Lafayette evolved into an even-tempered, moderate reformer, while always keeping true to his ideals. Lafayette early embraced the American Revolution (1776-83), later helped instigate the French Revolution (1789-99) and, later yet, encouraged France’s July Revolution (1830). Given his half-century of wide-ranging, trans-Atlantic activities, it is not surprising that Lafayette’s contemporaries and modern historians alike offer widely differing assessments of a career that thwarts easy summation.

Part I (1757-86) introduces Lafayette’s French context and unpacks his formidable role in the American Revolution. Born at the Château de Chavaniac, in Auvergne, the infant aristocrat was baptized Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier. Lafayette jested: “I was baptized like a Spaniard. But it was not my fault. And without pretending to deny myself the protection of Marie, Paul, Joseph, Roch and Yves, I more often called upon Saint Gilbert.” Independence would be Lafayette’s calling card, perhaps inevitably. When he was a toddler, his father died fighting in the Seven Years’ War. Lafayette’s only sibling, a younger sister, died too. With the death of his mother, in 1770, young Gilbert was orphaned, “left emotionally and psychologically alone in the world.” Still, resilient, he was commissioned an officer when 13. Great wealth helped too. Relocating to Versailles, he married into the powerful Noailles family and pursued a military career.

Mr. Duncan admits “it is hard to pin down the precise moment Lafayette latched on to the great ideas that animated the rest of his life: liberty, equality, and the rights of man.” By age 19, Lafayette had shed any “clumsy adolescence.” Having changed his coat-of-arms motto to “Cur Non” (“Why Not?”), in 1777 he sailed across the Atlantic seeking action in America’s War for Independence. Befriended by George Washington—the two maintained a lifelong friendship—he also “hit it off” with Alexander Hamilton, and others, like John Laurens and Thomas Jefferson.

A ‘Pitiful, Helpless Giant’ in Afghanistan Time for a NATO military operation to rescue those trapped behind Taliban lines.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/detached-from-afghanistan-reality-joe-biden-lloyd-austin-taliban-11629496129?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“A nation that hesitates to rescue its people for fear of the Taliban is behaving like a pitiful, helpless giant.”

President Biden provided an update Friday on the emergency evacuation effort in Kabul, and as usual he was his own worst advocate. The President’s optimistic view doesn’t fit the chaos on the ground or the fact that the mission continues to be hostage to the goodwill of the Taliban.

“We’ve made significant progress,” Mr. Biden said, taking credit for “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.” If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was describing a humanitarian airlift in Haiti rather than the desperate rescue of Americans trapped behind enemy lines.

***

It’s good news that U.S. troops finally control the Kabul airport and its single runway, though that’s all the allies control. It’s also good that 18,000 people have been evacuated since the Taliban took control of the capital. But the U.S. still doesn’t know how many Americans are in the country, and the U.S. Embassy warned this week that “the United States government cannot ensure safe passage to the Hamid Karzai International Airport.”

Mr. Biden said Friday that “we’re in constant contact with the Taliban,” who he says are letting Americans with passports through their checkpoints. But it’s distressing to hear a Commander in Chief admit that he’s relying on the promises of jihadists who have spent years killing Americans. Mr. Biden even suggested they’ll let Americans pass because, well, they need to make a good impression on the world community. Lovely.

The situation is worse for the thousands of Afghans who have applied for entry to the U.S. through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program. Including families, they total 50,000 or more. Mr. Biden vowed to evacuate them as well, as a matter of national honor.

‘Freedom Man’ II

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/freedom-man-ii/91627/

The image of the United States Marine reaching over the razor-wire-topped wall outside the Kabul airport to lift to freedom an Afghan infant from its parent’s hand is no doubt going to become one of the most famous photographs in the history of the Corps — not to mention our country. Even in the depths of our national humiliation, it turns out, millions still want to hand up their children to the arms of the United States military.*

That is something to cherish and remember amid the scramble to rescue Americans and their allies from the revenge of the Taliban. No matter how many mistakes Americans have made, our national motives have always been animated by high ideals and friendliness. It’s a point on which President Reagan launched his 1980 campaign, when he spoke to war veterans about Vietnam.

“It is time we recognized that ours was in truth, a noble cause,” he said at a time when almost no one else was saying it. The declaration about a war that America’s Congress had turned against helped him carry 44 states and win the White House. The idea clearly stayed with him, almost like a refrain, throughout his eight years in office. So much so, that he offered an echo of it in his farewell speech.

Reagan delivered his farewell remarks in January 1989. “I’ve been reflecting on what the past eight years have meant and mean,” Reagan said, “And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one — a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early eighties, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea.”

“The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him.

MY SAY: HYPERBOLE ON VACCINES

I am not an anti-vaxer but I will listen to contrary opinion. However, I cannot abide columns that compare government mandates, however  excessive, to Holocaust metaphor. The Holocaust deliberately singled out one of every three Jews in the world for extermination. To compare vaccine passports or mandated masks and vaccinations to that epic horror is egregious and insulting to the memory of the victims. rsk

Bank of Amerika The financial giant teaches that the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work.” Christopher Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/bank-of-america-racial-reeducation-program?wallit_nosession=1

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Sign up for his newsletter here.

Bank of America Corporation has implemented a racial reeducation program that claims the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work,” instructing white employees in particular to “decolonize [their] mind[s]” and “cede power to people of color.”

Earlier this year, Bank of America’s North Carolina and Charlotte market president Charles Bowman announced a new “equity” initiative called United in Action, in partnership with the United Way of Central Carolinas. According to documents I have obtained from a whistleblower, BOA executives launched the initiative by encouraging employees to participate in their “Racial Equity 21-Day Challenge,” a race-training program funded in part by the bank and built on the principles of critical race theory, including intersectionality, white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism.

On the program’s first day, Bank of America teaches employees that the United States is a “racialized society” that “use[s] race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression,” which “give[s] privileges to white people resulting in disadvantages to people of color.” According to the training program, all whites—“regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages”—are “living a life with white skin privileges.” Even children are implicated in the system of white supremacy: according to the program materials, white toddlers “develop racial biases by ages three to five” and “should be actively taught to recognize and reject the ‘smog’ of white privilege.”

Over the next three days, Bank of America teaches employees about intersectionality, unconscious bias, microaggressions, and systemic racism. “Racism in America idolizes White physical features and White values as supreme over those of others,” the program asserts. As a result of being part of the “dominant culture,” whites are more likely to “have more limited imagination,” “experience fear, anxiety, guilt, or shame,” “contribute to racial tension, hatred, and violence in our homes, communities, and world,” and, subsequently, “react in broken ways as a result.” People of color, on the other hand, cannot be racist, because “racism is used to justify the position of the dominant group . . . and to uphold white supremacy and superiority.” Therefore, the discussion guide claims, “reverse racism and discrimination are not possible.”