RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/07/an-abc-of-woke/

Originating as black American parlance for resisting racial and social inequality, Woke has morphed into a generic term for radically left-wing social and political awareness. According to Perry Bacon Jr. of the Washington Post it represents the following doctrines for the American Left: rejection of American exceptionalism; a claim that the United States has never been a true democracy; a claim that non-white people (“people of colour”) are victims of systemic and institutional racism; that white Americans enjoy “white privilege”; that African Americans deserve reparations for slavery and post-enslavement discrimination; that disparities among racial groups are explained by discrimination; that US law enforcement agencies are designed to discriminate against people of colour and so should be defunded, disbanded or at least heavily reformed; that women suffer from systemic sexism; that individuals should be able to identify with any gender or none; that US capitalism is deeply flawed.

Bacon’s list is not definitive, but the common subtext of Wokeism is invariably victimhood. This is a psychologically determined attitude, considered by Wokeists to transcend any contrary empirical evidence. Professor Jean-François Braunstein of the Sorbonne has remarked that Wokeism offers theories of knowledge that validate feelings over facts. Sometimes celebrities empathise with victimhood by claiming it for themselves. Prince Harry wanted us to believe that he had been “cut off” financially by his father, despite having been able to buy a multi-million-dollar Californian mansion; he also claims to “want his family back” and an apology from it, picturing himself as the injured party after insulting the royal family repeatedly in public.

Victimhood is now also becoming an excuse for violence by fringe groups with a dubious and anti-science agenda, for example “trans-activists”. Generational victimhood relating to climate change holds white civilisation responsible for creating global warming in the industrial revolution and exporting climate-damaging technology to the rest of the world, which is not therefore responsible for climate damage and should be paid reparations. Little or no mention is made of the astonishing benefits to mankind yielded by the industrial revolution, or of the self-critical culture of free countries that made them the first to urge action against climate change (as also against slavery).

Although European countries have quite different political and social features from America, they have imported Woke ideology pretty much wholesale. Even France, arguably the country least susceptible to Wokeism due to its “universalist” tradition, which in principle is blind to people’s colour and origin, has now got an incipiently woke Minister of Education. Pap Ndiaye told Le Monde that he did not experience racism growing up in France and only “realised that [he] was black” when he was twenty-five and studying in the United States. Indeed, importation to Europe happens chiefly through academia, where mediocre scholars have weaponised Woke ideology as a way of advancing their power by targeting individuals and institutions that can be presented as insufficiently conformist to Woke assumptions.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/08/23/the-summoning-rituals-of-the-left-n1721490

The malignant playbook of the contemporary left is generally considered to be Saul Alinsky’s 1989 “Rules for Radicals,” and there is certainly much truth to the story of the book’s destructive influence. But the source text for social and political upheaval is Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven’s far more detailed and authoritative 1997 manual, “The Breaking of the American Social Compact.”

The Cloward-Piven strategy seeks to hasten the fall of the free market and the republican structure of government by overloading the administrative apparatus with an avalanche of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis mode and eventual economic collapse. Choking the welfare rolls, for example, would serve to generate a political and financial meltdown, break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears, and bring the system crashing down. The fear, turmoil, and violence accompanying such a debacle would provide the perfect conditions for fostering radical change.

We see the strategy in action today, forging a situation that was unnecessary from the start via a series of tactical steps, among which: the campaign against productive farming; the so-called 15-minute city herding people into condo-congested urban centers where they are readily supervised and mastered; open borders allowing for a refugee tsunami to alter the character of the nation; a censoring and disinformative media rendered corrupt to the core; the mandating of useless masks or plausibly toxic vaccines; and the implementation of a digital currency in which citizens’ spending can be monitored, restricted, or even frozen. Such phenomena have no basis in even the remotest necessity but are essential in order to prepare the ground for an imminent totalitarian state.

This is the rationale for the so-called COVID pandemic and the bugbear of “Climate Change.” A bad flu season affecting mainly the elderly with comorbidities is not a viral pandemic, as Dr. Vernon Coleman ironically shows. The climate is always changing as a matter of course — the term “climate change” is a gross oxymoron; the thesis of anthropogenic forcing obscures the fact that carbon is material for life and nitrogen for farming. COVID and Climate are tactical phantoms that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with social control. The Clowardly rePivening put in place by the Democrat Party has only one aim: to create a crisis out of thin air and then seek to defuse it by creating a real crisis that advantages only the Party. It is the diabolical form of creation ex nihilo.

Thus, a ginned-up pandemic is a perfect excuse for mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, especially if the voter rolls have been flooded with uncountable and counterfeit names and the voting stations have been commandeered. There is no immigration chaos unless a chain system is entrenched and the border is left wide open. There is no such thing as “white supremacy” unless it is apodictically proclaimed and false-flag operations are carried out. There is no need for costly, largely ineffective, and harmful renewable energy installations unless drilling has been rendered illegal and the oil pipelines have been shut down to avoid a bogus climate catastrophe. The bible of the Democrat left begins: Let there be a crisis. And there was a crisis.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/23/government-funded-science-journal-admits-over-2600-of-its-papers-may-have-exaggerated-claims/

A top science journal that receives funding from the federal government was recently forced to admit that well over 2,000 of the research papers it has published contain “exaggerated claims.”

As Just The News reports, over 2,600 papers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) peer-reviewed journal Science were closely scrutinized by rival research journal Scientometrics. In the subsequent study, it was determined that, from 1997 to 2021, the journal saw a 40% drop in the use of “hedging” words.

In scientific research and other forms of academic writing, “hedging” words refers to terms and phrases such as “could” or “appear to,” in order to provide some room for doubt rather than depict absolute confidence. In 1997, there were roughly 115.8 examples of hedging for every 10,000 words. However, by 2021, that rate had fallen to just 67.42 per every 10,000.

Responding to the criticism, the news division of Science acknowledged that this new research “suggests a worrisome rise of unreliable, exaggerated claims.”

The non-profit watchdog group Influence Watch reports that “the federal government is the largest identifiable source of funding for AAAS,” as the association has received roughly $3.3 million per year from the federal government between 2008 and 2017, in addition to many other grants the association received.