By Steven Yates
August 17, 2024
… The specter of woke totalitarianism
The “surge.”
First things first. We’ve been reading (unless you’re wiser than I am and turned off “the news”) about the Kamala Harris “surge” that has disrupted what would probably have been a landslide victory for Trump in November, a victory so decisive that election theft wouldn’t have been a credible option no matter how many mail-in ballots, motor-voter chicaneries, boxes of ballets arriving at 3 am, or people voting from addresses that turn out to be empty lots there were.
Keep in mind that after the past four years — heck, after the past 40 years — anyone who takes anything “legacy” (corporate) media says at face value needs to have his head examined. If MSNBC or CNN or ABC or NBC or Politico or NPR tell me it’s a full moon tonight, I’m going to open the shades and look for myself.
So how much of this “surge” even exists outside media puffery.
Well, what we know is that hundreds of millions of dollars have flown into Kamala’s war chest since Dementia Joe succumbed to the “pressure” — probably it was more than that — from powerful Democrats to end his candidacy. Kamala clearly has the backing of the Establishment: corporate media, Hollywood and much of Silicon Valley, academia, and obviously the People’s Republics of Massachusetts and New York – Asylum on the Potomac power corridor.
She is clearly now the Establishment (leftist/globalist) candidate.
That’s what I’m going by.
What I’ve been saying all along: powerful people don’t want a second Trump presidency. They can’t control him, and they know it. Moreover, he won’t make the same mistakes this go round.
Kamala, on the other hand, will do as she’s told, just like Joe did. Since she owes every position she’s ever held to Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) policies, she’s arguably not bright enough to do otherwise.
Presidency-by-Committee
The first thing about a Kamala Harris presidency, therefore, is that it would be a presidency-by-committee. The committee would likely consist of the Obamas, the Clintons, Pelosi, Schumer (perhaps) — with George Soros and Larry Fink (BlackRock’s megabillionaire CEO) somewhere in the background — and probably others whose names we don’t know. Arch-globalists all.
This isn’t new. Given Joe’s now-recognized cognitive decline — which Kamala dishonestly helped to hide for four years — we’ve had presidency-by-committee since January 21, 2021. It was the committee who told him, “you’re done.”
What will be new is the difficulty hiding this feature of a dumbed down political system, visibly hard left but servicing globalism-on-steroids while simultaneously trying to avoid blowing up the world in a major war.
Kamala’s VP pick, Tim Walz, checks almost all the hard-left boxes: he’s pro-abort, anti-gun, supports men pretending to be women, is pro-BLM. He let Minneapolis burn during the George Floyd riots. He drew the line at defunding the police, suggesting a spark of something between his ears. But then again, “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness” is his oft-repeated venture into breathtaking stupidity.
No great expectations here, therefore. Walz is no more qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency than Kamala has been. This assessment is possible without even considering doubts a few Republicans have raised about his military service.
The long and the short of it: this would be the most hard left presidency-by-committee in U.S. history: more of a DIE administration than Obama’s or Biden’s ever thought of being. We could definitely expect to see more men pretending to be women holding cabinet positions, and you’d not be allowed to ask questions. The abortion death culture will stay intact, and then some.
Some conservatives have spoken of “woke totalitarianism.” Let’s explore this notion a bit.
Woke Totalitarianism.
Many of us, back in the day — for me it was the early 1990s — underestimated the cultural power the hard left had even then. This power is based on emotion, not reason. It is also based on the Platonist idea that some are most fit to rule others. This is a powerful psychological motivator in some personality types who identify with power-elitism and believe they should be allowed to dictate terms to the unwashed peasants. And to enlist as many of the latter as possible to further their own enslavement to agendas, via “virtue signaling” or worse.
Wokism built on this. It incorporates the Hegelian master-slave dichotomy and the Marxian notion that the “wrong masters” have been in charge all this time. Hence the incipient call for revolution characteristic of all forms of Marxism, of which wokism is just the latest variant. After the revolution, the philosopher-kings will be in charge: intellectual-activists ready to impose, willy nilly, their vision of Utopia. This, too, is a Platonist idea (it is central to Plato’s major dialogue The Republic).
Marx placed the working class, “the proletariat” (Hegelian slaves, opposed to their “bourgeois” masters) on a pedestal, but neither he nor Engels nor Lenin nor Stalin not Trotsky ever worked at a “proletariat” job in their lives. They would never have deigned to interact with the rabble. Hence they had no clue how real working people think. The Frankfurt School Marxists finally figured out that the real proletariat don’t want to overthrow the bourgeoisie but join it, or have their children join it, through enterprise and hard work. That motivated the Frankfurt School shift from economics to culture, advocated separately by Italian communist Gramsci, and begin their “long march through the institutions.” This is why we speak of cultural Marxism as the foundation of wokism.
One ingredient was missing, though, and Marcuse supplied it in the 1960s. He replaced class with race. His proteges added gender, sexual preference, and world religions so long as Christianity was excluded as cultural Marxism sought to destroy Christianity.
Since too much of the working class was white, male, and Christian, the increasingly cultural Marxist Democrat Party kicked them under the bus — furthering their gradual immiseration and increased impoverishment was corporate globalism sending their jobs to China for cheaper labor. This meant higher profits for the neoliberals atop corporations (neoliberalism purports to be about markets but goes hand in hand with corporate wokism, just in case corporate wokism also makes money).
The Federal Reserve contributed by debauching the dollar. Hence inflation, with no corresponding increases in wages.
Naturally the mostly white, male, and Christian working class voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016, again in 2020, and will be voting for him this November despite the “felony convictions” that are convinced are products of a system rigged by Democrats and probably just the start of 2024’s election theft.
The academically-trained, and media wokesters, fancy themselves as our era’s philosopher-kings, “understanding” as they do the “problems” of hidden “systemic racism,” “the patriarchy,” “gender as a social construction,” “transphobia,” etc., etc., while defending “reproductive freedoms” (i.e., the aforementioned death culture, the freedom to kill the expendable unborn).
Academic wokesters have all but destroyed American universities. If you don’t believe me, watch this; then realize that Portland State is just an extreme case of the sort of thing going on everywhere, even if in diluted forms, as woke Generation Z moves through college.
They’re delusional, of course. Most owe their voices to the agendas they serve, which is itself subordinate to the “greater” agenda. As people able to get anything useful done, few could set up and run a hot dog stand much less guide a civilization.
The real would-be philosopher-kings are in the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Tavistock Institute, etc.; and in corporate octopuses like BlackRock, Vanguard, etc.; and in central banks at the top of which is the Band for International Settlements. These legs, arms, and branches of the Global Corporatocracy have considerably more resources to throw into their projects than a bunch of woke academics who serve to distract the public with gosh-gee-whiz stuff at the former’s pleasure. The real would-be philosopher-kings have thrown the bulk of their resources into leviathan financial institutions, political classes and technocratic bureaucracies, and corporate mass media to maintain financial and narrative control.
They won’t object to woke totalitarianism because it is a useful control instrument. Most whites fear being called a racist in public. In the present woke-controlled environment it can be career-ending: unless you have the ingenuity (and the personal financial resources) of, say, a Tucker Carlson, you’re canceled and might as well not exist.
Hence we see the U.K’s new Labour Party regime led by Keir Starmer trying to repress the anti-immigration / anti open borders mass protests by demonizing its participants as racists and “far-right extremists.” British citizens can now be handed jail sentences for posting or even reposting politically incorrect, anti-immigration social media posts on X. This regime has even threatened Elon Musk, X’s owner, with legal action even though he’s nowhere near the U.K. (he’s also been threatened by the globalist EU).
As Aaron and Melissa Dykes (proprietors of Truthstream Media) observe in this crucially important video I hope readers will watch when we get done here, if you don’t have free speech, you don’t have any other freedoms. Which explains why the battle on campuses on our side of the Atlantic is fundamentally a battle over who is allowed to say what.
The woke totalitarians are those who would not just crush free speech but modify language in ways that protesting their agendas would be impossible. George Orwell gave us an introduction in his two novels Animal Farm and 1984, how this is done. Today’s totalitarians have (as I’ve noted previously many times) introduced invented concepts like homophobia and transphobia which aren’t real phobias in any clinical, scientific sense at all. Another of the signs of a woke totalitarian is how they throw around words like hate speech and harm but never define them. They want safe spaces free from microaggressions, also given circular definitions at best.
We can speak of woke as totalitarian because ultimately it is about total compliance. Control over language means thought control. And woe unto dissidents. It is still fortunate that in the U.S., at least, the un-woke and anti-woke still have avenues they can explore after they’ve been fired from jobs by woke universities or woke corporations. Free speech isn’t yet illegal in the U.S. I’m sure, however, that under a Kamala Harris / Tim Walz regime, the woke will go to work on this!
Woke totalitarianism was also exemplified in Canada’s WEF Young Global Leader president Justin Trudeau ordering the freezing of bank accounts of truckers who protested plandemic policies back in 2022.
This brings us to what the real elites, the real would-be philosopher-kings want, which I’ve enumerated many times before. They don’t really care how many men pretending to be women there are in women’s sports, or in government, although if enough such agents of chaos are around and made highly visible through, e.g., participation in the Olympics where they sow discord and confusion, this helps the real power elites in the Global Corporatocracy (gosh gee whiz again).
They want total surveillance and control over obedient techno-feudal peasants, and a Kamala Harris / Tim Walz presidency will help them get it.
The real war, again, is being waged on those of us who want to worship God, live morally worthy and prosperous lives, take care of our families, contribute to our communities, and otherwise be left alone.
Philosopher-kings and the fallacies of globalism and multiculturalism.
Philosophy, etymologically, means the love of wisdom. Sadly, the academic subject might as well be dead. Its capacity to influence the public conversation for the better is nil, and for the most part, deservedly so.
To be wise surely includes wanting a better and more humane world. It also means recognizing our limitations in building such a world. We’re not God. Our natural state is limitedness of thought, knowledge, and action.
The truly wise therefore understand that national-level centralization cannot be made to work for everybody … much less global-scale centralization.
Why not?
Because while physical nature can conceivably be understood through the application of a few basic principles (typically expressed mathematically), this is not true of human societies. The kinds of principles that help us truly understand human nature, e.g., that human beings act consciously on their surroundings and don’t simply obey physical law, that every one of us is slightly different, and every one of us wants to be important, don’t enable totality of understanding and technocratic control.
They indicate that we all have our own quests we are on, and we don’t care if would-be elites approve or not.
Any legitimate social inquiry has as its subject matter the millions of anonymous people on their personal quests. This means enormous complexity. Complexity by definition cannot be planned, or planned for. It can only be interfered with, and those interferences inevitably cause far more problems than they solve.
The truly wise, therefore, will back off. They will recognize the natural rights of persons to live as they see fit in their communities, which usually means the right to adhere to the traditions of their forefathers such as family structures, traditions that have proven to work (to solve the problems of survival and political-economic organization) over time. They will understand that one of the bases of community is trust, via longstanding relationships, familial and professional: that (except for the occasional hermit) most people prefer to interact with those they know, like, and trust.
Coerced, elite-directed multiculturalism goes against this by opening borders and allowing into traditional societies (without asking them) populations consisting of mostly unknown quantities. No multicultural society based on elite-sponsored, top-down policy has ever remained stable and peaceful for any length of time. People naturally hesitate to interact with those who don’t speak their language or even recognize the legitimacy of their culture. At best, they hunker down. If it comes to it, they rebel. A murder of one or more natives by an immigrant or someone perceived as such will spark a mass rebellion. This is what happened in the U.K.
Peoples who differ from one another in fundamental ways (e.g., holding different religious beliefs) but are forced to live under the same political roof tend to resent it. Consider Yugoslavia, which held together under Tito’s dictatorial control and then blew apart very quickly following his death. The region has been a tinderbox ever since.
Yet coerced multiculturalism is the official policy of the EU, and despite Brexit, of the U.K., and of the U.S. under the Democrat Party (and Establishment Republicans). Opponents of free migration across open borders are denounced — this is typical woke totalitarianism — as racists, or far-right extremists. This despite the fact, for fact it is, that free migration impoverishes and destroys the cohesiveness of neighborhoods, communities, civilizations — quite independently of any crime element. There is truth to the saying that if you import the third world, you become the third world.
There are ways peoples who are different can learn to forge relationships and build trust, but these take special leadership and communication skills, including good will which must be cultivated, further skill-building in those being led, and then the ultimate crucible which is time, freed of economic or other sources of disruption. Time, and freedom from disruption, are what we do not presently have in abundance. This process cannot be coerced, moreover. It must be carried out from the bottom up, not from the top down. If opponents have to, they will engage in passive resistance by doing the absolute minimum in coerced-multicultural workplaces. They will stay indoors as their neighborhoods disintegrate.
A Kamala Harris – Tim Walz presidency-by-committee won’t get any of this, of course. Nor will its media defenders and supporters nor the people who will vote for such a presidency. (Neither will the left wing Keir Starmer regime in the U.K. get it; nor the Euro-crats in Brussels thought they were separating from.)
Trump / MAGA probably gets some of it instinctively (but not enough).
The real elites in the real power centers (such as the City of London, and Basel and Davos, Switzerland; and possibly the Vatican) don’t care one way or the other, so long as their capacity to increase their global wealth and power increases. It’s important to keep this in mind going forward.
© 2024 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2012 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.
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Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
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