Excellent piece and I'm with you 100%. The South Park episode on "Smug Pollution" caused by an epidemic of Prius owners truly nailed the woke movement early on. I'm beyond "Gaza Guilt Fatigue" brought on by a contingent of my Instagram friends who never once mention the oppression faced by women, children, non-Muslims, and LGBTQ citizens of Gaza before 10/7. As you've so well documented, in their eyes, the atrocity there is solely about white colonialism (all Jews must look like Harvey Weinstein) with no further care to discuss the myriad of confluences or the complexity of lasting solutions. A final note today -- did you see the CNN headline on the Trump indictment? They made it solely about "brings new challenges for Harris", deflecting it 100% from Trump. Meanwhile, as expected, the top to bottom feeds on most major news sites this week (CBS, CNN, ABC, NYT, WaPo) are normalizing Trump/Vance and declaring Harris/Walz have no chance at (or huge obstacles to) winning -- with WAY more opinion pieces dominating the feed than I normally see, plus misleading clickbait headlines.
Economic justice can lead to social justice for a wide and diverse audience. It's good politics. The Boomers created a system that worshiped wealth and if you didn't play ball, you got left behind in many states. Turned a lot of normal people into housing and stock gamblers for need of survival.
“While these issues are important and should be discussed, they have become religious dogma”
Religious dogma is a good phrase for it and made my think of an issue that has been bugging me for months. The last 2 years I’ve become obsessed with early Christianity and how a group of 20odd people got so upset at the unfair killing of their friend they launched a movement that changed the world, one thing you discover researching that far back in the past however is the challenges that come finding the original of any document prior to the printing press, for example the letters of Paul in the Bible the earliest version we have are from the 4th century, that’s hundreds of years of copies of copies of copies of copies that are being passed around and copies come with mistakes, so we have no idea what was actually written down on the actual letter by Paul
If we have this challenge researching the history of a culture with the written word, how much tougher is it to research the history of purely oral cultures like indigenous groups, now on the left when I challenge Christianity I will get cheers, but if I start asking about how strange it is that both Indigenous Canadians and Indigenous Australians had cultures that included ‘welcome to country’ or ‘land acknowledgment’ rituals, you get told you can’t ask questions about that. But seriously though, what are the chance’s that totally independent cultures on literal opposite ends of the earth had the same, or basically the same, rituals and traditions. Couldn’t it be more likely than it or modern connected world different indigenous groups mixed up their stories and history’s, possibly at times to play to white prejudice when it might benefit them? What proof do we have that welcome to country was a real thing that these tribes did 10,000 years ago? Does anyone question this? Are you allowed to question this? And if not why not?
I’m genuinely interested to the answers to these questions, were these rituals global in nature and if so does that tell us something far deeper about what it means to be human than it does about any sectional interest? Or if there is no evidence for these rituals among some cultures that now claim them, then why did they adopt this history? And what amazing rituals waiting to be discovered did exist before they were subsumed into this globalised idea of indigenous culture?
These and many more are all fascinating questions the cul-de-sac of identity politics prevents us from asking, this comment is too long already but anyone silly or bored enough to read this far I think gets my point
With the DNC putting the final stake through the heart of the politics of 2016-22 it is really bad news for the right. Now for the first time in 6 years they’re gonna have to explain what their actual ideas are, as we’ve seen with Project 2025 this doesn’t tend to go well.
The huge issue the right have at the moment is that we’re living in a world that has the opportunities and problems of its time, but the Right do not have a plan for the problems of the 2020s they’re still rolling out the Thatcher/Reagan playbook that were a set of conservative solutions to the problems of the 1970s, very different problems than those we face today yet they provide the same ‘solutions’
Excellent piece and I'm with you 100%. The South Park episode on "Smug Pollution" caused by an epidemic of Prius owners truly nailed the woke movement early on. I'm beyond "Gaza Guilt Fatigue" brought on by a contingent of my Instagram friends who never once mention the oppression faced by women, children, non-Muslims, and LGBTQ citizens of Gaza before 10/7. As you've so well documented, in their eyes, the atrocity there is solely about white colonialism (all Jews must look like Harvey Weinstein) with no further care to discuss the myriad of confluences or the complexity of lasting solutions. A final note today -- did you see the CNN headline on the Trump indictment? They made it solely about "brings new challenges for Harris", deflecting it 100% from Trump. Meanwhile, as expected, the top to bottom feeds on most major news sites this week (CBS, CNN, ABC, NYT, WaPo) are normalizing Trump/Vance and declaring Harris/Walz have no chance at (or huge obstacles to) winning -- with WAY more opinion pieces dominating the feed than I normally see, plus misleading clickbait headlines.
Very well said!
Not to mention that the NYT published a guest option piece on how Trump “can win on character.” They have lost their collective minds.
Excellent article, thank you for your courage!! 😊
Economic justice can lead to social justice for a wide and diverse audience. It's good politics. The Boomers created a system that worshiped wealth and if you didn't play ball, you got left behind in many states. Turned a lot of normal people into housing and stock gamblers for need of survival.
“While these issues are important and should be discussed, they have become religious dogma”
Religious dogma is a good phrase for it and made my think of an issue that has been bugging me for months. The last 2 years I’ve become obsessed with early Christianity and how a group of 20odd people got so upset at the unfair killing of their friend they launched a movement that changed the world, one thing you discover researching that far back in the past however is the challenges that come finding the original of any document prior to the printing press, for example the letters of Paul in the Bible the earliest version we have are from the 4th century, that’s hundreds of years of copies of copies of copies of copies that are being passed around and copies come with mistakes, so we have no idea what was actually written down on the actual letter by Paul
If we have this challenge researching the history of a culture with the written word, how much tougher is it to research the history of purely oral cultures like indigenous groups, now on the left when I challenge Christianity I will get cheers, but if I start asking about how strange it is that both Indigenous Canadians and Indigenous Australians had cultures that included ‘welcome to country’ or ‘land acknowledgment’ rituals, you get told you can’t ask questions about that. But seriously though, what are the chance’s that totally independent cultures on literal opposite ends of the earth had the same, or basically the same, rituals and traditions. Couldn’t it be more likely than it or modern connected world different indigenous groups mixed up their stories and history’s, possibly at times to play to white prejudice when it might benefit them? What proof do we have that welcome to country was a real thing that these tribes did 10,000 years ago? Does anyone question this? Are you allowed to question this? And if not why not?
I’m genuinely interested to the answers to these questions, were these rituals global in nature and if so does that tell us something far deeper about what it means to be human than it does about any sectional interest? Or if there is no evidence for these rituals among some cultures that now claim them, then why did they adopt this history? And what amazing rituals waiting to be discovered did exist before they were subsumed into this globalised idea of indigenous culture?
These and many more are all fascinating questions the cul-de-sac of identity politics prevents us from asking, this comment is too long already but anyone silly or bored enough to read this far I think gets my point
With the DNC putting the final stake through the heart of the politics of 2016-22 it is really bad news for the right. Now for the first time in 6 years they’re gonna have to explain what their actual ideas are, as we’ve seen with Project 2025 this doesn’t tend to go well.
The huge issue the right have at the moment is that we’re living in a world that has the opportunities and problems of its time, but the Right do not have a plan for the problems of the 2020s they’re still rolling out the Thatcher/Reagan playbook that were a set of conservative solutions to the problems of the 1970s, very different problems than those we face today yet they provide the same ‘solutions’