October 15, 2023

Alternate media never gets the credit it deserves. Elon Musk has taken over Twitter (now “X”) and allowed free speech. In the process wokesters — particularly in the intellectual and moral cesspool absurdly continued to be called “higher education” — and media have exposed themselves as ignorant embracers of bestiality. Hamas’s snuff films posted there establish what they are.  The compromised and partisan reporters on the ground never did this, and sentient readers have every reason to view mainstream media as pap for imbeciles.

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What exactly do I mean by “wokesters” — what do they believe and why? Richard Samuelson in a brilliant essay analyzes their thinking and its genesis, and in so doing shows how their acts make them worthy of contempt.

In the wake of the barbaric attack on Israel, many Americans have been shocked, angered, and disgusted to see woke organizations express anything other than condemnation for Hamas. On campuses and in our communities, students and organizations like Black Lives Matter have expressed support for the butchers of Jews. Meanwhile, all too many campus leaders, formerly so quick to condemn even the hint of racism, can barely muster even weak condemnation of such savagery. Many Americans find themselves shaking their heads in dismay.

Where does this blindness come from? Why are so many people who think of themselves as crusaders for justice so misguided?

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It is a complicated story. But one key part of that story is the way that civil rights, which began as a cause, became an ideology. Eventually that ideology metastasized into “anti-racism,” a radical legal doctrine that scholar John McWhorter suggests is nothing less than a secular “religion.” The once-noble cause of civil rights changed. No longer merely about ending specific acts of discrimination in voting, employment, and public accommodations, it became a crusade to rectify the wrongs of slavery, Jim Crow, and the lingering legacy of institutional racism. [snip] The woke movement’s larger hope is to transform America, and the world, fundamentally. The historical record is a sad one, full of barbarism, tragedy, and savagery. One can hardly blame people for wishing the future might be less bloody than the past. But if the tragic side of human life is due to the inevitable contradictions in the human condition, such idealism always tends to cross over into misanthropy. There is a deep moral lesson in the story of Satan being a fallen angel. [snip] In other words, todays wokesters combine the hatred of racial discrimination with a radical desire for a utopian future. And Jews are in the way of that project. That is hardly a novel turn in history. Hitler called the Holocaust the “Final Solution.” It was, more exactly, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Like today’s progressives, Hitler had hope for a better future: “I believe in a conclusive understanding among peoples which will come sooner or later. There is no point in bringing about co-operation among nations, based upon permanent understanding, until this Jewish fission-fungus of peoples has been removed.” Karl Marx said something similar. In his essay on “The Jewish Question,” Marx said that progress would not take place until Jews stopped being Jews. The Hamas Charter expresses a similar version of the Muslim apocalypse…

To allow religious and ethnic diversity is to allow a world in which tragic divisions and choices remain fundamental to politics, with the terrible consequences they necessarily entail. To recognize the necessity of a Jewish Israel is to reject comprehensive progress through merely human (as opposed to divine) means. Rather than admit that, many American progressives choose to shoot the messenger, or, as in this case, to back those who will.

And back them they did, even as Hamas displayed their war trophies before their cameras and the world — battered bodies, captured women, and kidnapped babies held as human shields in their brutal hands.

In another brilliant essay, Victor Davis Hanson plows the same ground. 

One unexpected blowback from the medieval Hamas’s barbaric murdering of hundreds of Israeli civilians is the revelation of current global amorality.

More than 20 Harvard university identity politics groups pledged their support to the Hamas murderers — to the utter silence for days of Harvard President Claudine Gay.