RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/philadelphias-woke-entertainment/

When you attend a play at one of the smaller theaters in Philadelphia, what you get before Act One is something called a ‘Land Acknowledgment’ speech. This is a statement reminding you that the ground the theater was built on was once “owned” by Native Americans before it was stolen by the evil colonists and settlers.

What that statement never explains is that when the same land was “owned” by Native Americans centuries ago, it was often stolen by other Native tribes in violent ways.

In other words, Native American society was just as warlike as any other in human history.

Jeff Flynn Paul in ‘The Spectator,’ explains:

“In North America, most Natives were primitive farmers. This means that (with some exceptions) they had no permanent settlements: they farmed in an area for a few decades until the soil got tired, before moving on to greener pastures where the hunting was better and the lands more fertile. This meant that tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes.“

Real history, of course, doesn’t matter, since most of the subscribers at these little theaters are committed leftists.

Thankfully, there are no ‘land acknowledgment’ speeches in the city’s larger, commercial theaters. Yet even here on opening night you’ll hear a sprinkling of words like “equity” and “diversity” in the welcoming remarks—a little woke salt to keep pace with the more radical thespians on the other side of town.

Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before the city’s commercial venues fill opening night with stories about how Native Americans built wigwam settlements and campfires where the theater’s bar is located.

When Daniel Fish’s rehabbed “Oklahoma” came to the city’s Forrest Theater in 2022 (in 2009, the rights to the original show were sold to a Netherlands-based pension fund), audiences were in for a shock. Suddenly, middle class season ticket holders were face to face with a didactic, virtue-signaling Bolveshik rape of a beloved American classic.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2023/11/05/one-of-glamour-mags-women-of-the-year-is-you-guessed-it-a-dude-n4923642

You might think this game is getting tired, but the left is just getting started. Gracing the featured photo for Glamour magazine’s 2023 Women of the Year edition is someone who has no business being part of a Women of the Year feature at all, because he is not a woman. But in these halcyon days of the left’s hegemony, up is down and black is white and fantasy is reality, and so men are women, Hamas jihad terrorists are oppressed freedom fighters, and Joe Biden is a capable, competent chief executive.

Glamour didn’t just feature this guy in, you know, a glamor shot, doing his level best (with the help of an untold number of surgical procedures, tons of makeup, strategic lighting, and I shudder to think what else) to fool the world into thinking that he really is a woman. The venerable fashion giant also made him the subject of a lavish, two-thousand-word puff piece that was published Wednesday, all about how he has suffered from the stifling mores of hidebound traditionalists who insist on believing that men are men and can’t become women no matter how energetically they fantasize.

But at Glamour, as with the left in general, fantasy is the name of the game. The title of the puff piece is “Geena Rocero Is Writing Her Truth,” and there you have it: “her truth,” not the truth. The hubristic and godless left believes that it can remake reality any way it wishes, and if the facts don’t match its view of the world, then so much worse for the facts. 

And so the Glamour piece happily pretends that Geena Rocero is actually not only a woman, but a fashion model, with his accessories lovingly noted underneath each glamor shot: “Gucci look. Maria Tash earrings.” “Fendi dress. Maria Tash earrings. Cartier bracelet and ring. Giuseppe Zanotti boots.” “Area suit. Maria Tash earrings. Cartier ring. Jimmy Choo pumps.” Apparently “Maria Tash earrings” is akin to “There’s no place like home” in “The Wizard of Oz”: repeat it often enough, and presto! Geena will be a real woman.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/04/the-book-ban-clan/

In Rules for Radicals, far-left organizer Saul Alinsky’s classic work on labor activism,  number 13 in his rules of power tactics reads, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Alinsky’s words are in full view these days in the form of “book banning” charges, a current mantra of the American left. And, as we are in the middle of “Banned Books Week,” the onslaught is massive. Front and center in the movement is the American Library Association, whose 2023 Banned Books Week theme is “Let Freedom Read.” The ALA insists that our democracy is imperiled and “that the safety of our right to speak and think freely is directly in proportion to our right to read.”

Similarly, a new report from PEN America, a left-wing advocacy group, informs us that school book bans and restrictions in the U.S. rose 33% in the last school year, continuing what the organization deems a worrisome effort aimed at the “suppression of stories and ideas.” 

The Biden Administration thinks we are in dire straits and has appointed a deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. This “book ban czar” is entrusted to “enforce federal civil rights laws and address threats to civil rights.”

A spokesman from the Education Department adds, “The Department of Education remains firm in its commitment to ensure all students are protected from all forms of discrimination.” 

Not to be outdone, California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill into law barring school boards from banning books, instructional materials, or curricula labeled as inclusive or diverse. He proclaims, “Remarkable that we’re living in a country right now in this banning binge, this cultural purge that we’re experiencing all throughout America, and now increasingly here in the state of California, where we have school districts large and small banning books, banning free speech, criminalizing librarians and teachers.”

In reality, whatever righteousness Banned Books Week may have once held – it started in 1982 – it has been taken over by progressives who, in large part, are trying to legitimize the field once known as “obscenity.”

In fact, most of the so-called “banned books” are nothing more than an attempt by parents not to have their children exposed to kiddie porn. For example, they don’t want their children to read books like Gender Queer, in which the protagonist says, “I can’t wait to have your c**k in my mouth — I’m going to give you the bl*w j*b of your life. Then I want you inside me.” Or maybe they don’t think their kid should be subjected to Lawn Boy, which contains a passage about 10-year-old boys performing oral sex on each other. Or perhaps they don’t want their child to be read Crank, which details meth addiction and rape.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-woke-witch-hunt-has-taken-over-the-arts/

Remove the preconceptions that stop you seeing clearly, and it is hard to tell the difference between how the arts are treated in the UK versus a dictatorship. In Russia and China, the authoritarian state is the oppressive force. In the West, the state won’t arrest you for breaking taboos, and for that we must be grateful. But perhaps we should refrain from being too pleased with ourselves.

Woke – or if you don’t like the word, identitarian – movements rather than authoritarian governments can still force degrading confessions to ideological thought crimes. Friends can still denounce each other, as if we were in America during the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s or China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Fear can still run through the arts, publishing and the liberal press. And, as in true autocracies, the price of speaking out can still mean losing your job and any chance of alternative work in your chosen field.

The accusation that Greig had endorsed an unorthodox opinion was enough to send him into frantic efforts to save his career

So commonplace are the symptoms of fear we barely register them now. A few days ago, to quote an example that got next to no publicity, an ‘interdisciplinary artist’ called Rosie Aspinall Priest took it upon herself to go through the social media of David Greig, a Scottish playwright and theatre director, as if this were an entirely normal way to behave – in the arts today I am afraid to say it is.

Her snooping paid off. She announced that Greig was guilty of ‘openly liking transphobic tweets’: a career-destroying offence, as she must have known. But how transphobic did they need to be to finish Greig off?

One tweet Greig liked referred to ‘gender madness’, a sackable offence, apparently. A second contrasted the police’s cruel arrest of an autistic girl, who had said that one of their officers looked like her ‘lesbian nana’, with the cops’ light handling of a transgender activist who allegedly punched a gender-critical feminist in the face.  

So you can be sure I am not misreading this, here is the tweet Greig liked in full. He was damned for endorsing the sentiment that ‘if you are a 16-year-old autistic girl who says someone looks like a lesbian you will be arrested and held in custody, but if you are a 26-year-old man who punches a woman twice at a women’s rights rally, you will just be cautioned’. And that was it. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/08/08/the-smear-campaign-against-jk-rowling/

Here we go again. Another institution, brimming with self-righteous faux outrage, is trying to airbrush JK Rowling’s name out of history. This time it’s the turn of the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle, Washington, which has removed the world-famous author’s name from its Harry Potter exhibition. Last week, the museum announced that while it will continue to display memorabilia from the Harry Potter books and films, it wants no association with their supposedly problematic creator.

Explaining the decision in a 1,400-word blog, the museum’s exhibitions project manager, Chris Moore, brands Rowling a ‘cold, heartless, joy-sucking entity’. Moore, who identifies as trans and uses ‘he / them’ pronouns, takes exception to Rowling’s ongoing interest in preserving women’s hard-won rights over the ‘right of anyone who insists they are who they say they are’. Once again, Rowling’s reasonable and rational defence of women’s sex-based rights is being presented disingenuously as ‘hateful’ or ‘harmful’ towards transgender people, and therefore deserving of cancellation.

Moore even seems to think it would be better if Rowling had never existed. ‘We would love to go with the internet’s theory that these books were actually written without an author’, he writes, ‘but this certain person is a bit too vocal with her super hateful and divisive views to be ignored’.

Strikingly, Moore goes a few steps further than most of Rowling’s critics. He doesn’t just accuse her of transphobia. He also accuses the Harry Potter books of peddling ‘racial stereotypes’, promoting ‘fat shaming’ and, perhaps most heinous of all, lacking ‘LGBTQIA+ representation’. Surely to goodness there must have been a few pansexual / nonbinary students in the imaginary, magical school of Hogwarts? Shame on JKR for not giving them a voice, eh? The headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, might have been gay, but apparently that’s not enough in our world of 764 genders.

I find myself torn about this particular non-event, to be perfectly honest. On the one hand, I realise this is simply the latest in a long line of attempts to shut Rowling up. ‘I saw Goody Rowling, in the barn, consorting with the devil!’ is the tone of every such outburst. By now, these tricks have become cheap and obvious to anyone observing closely. The smears are always baseless.

On the other hand, the attempts to erase Rowling are deadly serious. Each attempted takedown inevitably leads to her receiving the vilest, cruellest abuse. Abuse which, if you’ve ever taken the time to read it, contains some of the most horrific things one human could say to or about another. Rowling is no doubt a tower of strength and resilience, having been on the receiving end of this bile for years. But it’s probably still having an effect on her, deep down.

Perhaps there is an upside to this stunt by Moore and the MoPOP, however. Removing Rowling’s name from the museum, and condemning her as ‘super hateful’, is so infantile that most right-thinking people will likely see it for the foolishness it really is. Sunlight, on occasions such as these, has a remarkable effect of highlighting the absurd and often cruel behaviour of the gender ideologues. People are getting wise to these smear tactics now that they are so regularly churned out. The problem is it is difficult to get people to speak out against them.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/07/14/you-wont-believe-what-disney-is-doing-to-snow-white-n1710609

Disney is making a live-action version of Snow White, because of course they are, and the movie looks even worse and more woke than even my jaded self could have imagined because management has not yet finished relieving itself on the quality content produced in bygone eras.

The corpse of Walt Disney could not be reached for comment due to spinning so hard that it was last seen digging its way deep into the Earth’s mantle.

For only the third time in VodkaPundit’s 21-year history, I find myself with almost nothing to say other than, “I literally can’t even.” The first time was maybe a year ago.

But do notice that I wrote “almost nothing,” because, please, just look at this:

The formerly “fair maiden” known as Snow White is now Latina and the Seven Dwarves are One Dwarf and Six Painfully Diverse Magical Creatures Dressed in Garb Cast-Off from the Greater Des Moines Renaissance Faire.

The live-action Snow White will be, from all appearances, not only worse than you imagine but worse than you can imagine.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wokesters-in-search-of-nonbinary-birds-1d65ed47?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The politicization of formerly respected scientific publications is one of society’s more disturbing recent trends and it seems that yet another periodical is willing to surrender its claim to authority.

Laura Helmuth, Editor in chief of Scientific American, recently tweeted:

White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways
P.S. Nature is amazing
P.P.S. Sex is not binary

Other Twitter users were not impressed. Ms. Helmuth’s missive now carries an attachment from Twitter:

Readers added context they thought people might want to know
White-throated sparrows have 2 sexes with 4 unique chromosome combinations.
There are still just 2 sexes that produce either sperm or eggs.
The female types are the white-striped females and the tan-striped females. The male birds are white-striped males and tan striped males.

One can debate whether and how Twitter should address errors in user comments, but it’s clear that the operators of the social media platform are not the only ones raising an objection to the claim of a sparrow with four sexes

https://www.frontpagemag.com/this-is-shakespeare-this-is-woke-shakespeare/

To paraphrase an 80s anti-drug ad, “this is Shakespeare, this is woke Shakespeare.” Any questions?

(If you enjoyed this episode of woke Shakespeare, be sure to tune in to your local PBS station for more.)

The obvious question is “why bother”, but the obvious answer is that wokes (unlike old school lefties who could be creative) are cultural parasites, incapable of creating anything new, and thrive only on tainting the old.

It’s why the entertainment industry churns out bastardized versions of its intellectual properties, yet makes nothing new that endures.

Wokes are incapable of grasping the content of anything, only the surface context. And thus they obsessively remake things in line with their deconstructionist sensibilities. Shakespeare to them is no different than Star Wars, Dickens, 1776 or Marvel comics, it’s all the same, replace the cast with a completely inappropriate identity politics assemblage and revamp its message so that it deconstructs whatever it ever was.

Wokes think that they’re ushering in a revolution when all they’re doing is demonstrating their incomprehension of the original material. But that is why they’re wokes. Wokes can be offended by anything, but they don’t understand anything. Philosophically, they’re all surface impressions, reading their tired Marxist tropes into any classical work and then plugging in a “diverse” cast to hammer home the revolutionary message.

But there are no more revolutions. The only woke cultural revolution still going on is narcissism. Wokes don’t want to change the world, they want to revel only in their outrage and false sense of superiority by destroying anything that predated them, anything they don’t understand, and turn it into a virus broadcasting their virtue.