When WaPo's wokeness invokes George Orwell—where Freedom is White Supremacy—ya gotta ask what is going on?
On February 11, the Washington Post published a long "perspectives" article written by a PhD student at U. Penn. Most of it is unintelligible, pseudo-intellectual jibberish. How did it possibly get so many column inches? Why was it published? More on that later. Here is how the article starts:
Made by History Perspective
The Ottawa trucker convoy is rooted in Canada’s settler colonial history
Canada’s dark history of public health has a long past of hiding behind ‘politeness'
And here is some of her anti-Convoy fact-light propaganda:
While the convoy’s supporters have characterized the protest as a peaceful movement, uninformed by “politics, race, religion, or any personal beliefs,” many supporters have been associated with or expressed racist, Islamophobic and white-supremacist views. When Tucker Carlson of Fox News interviewed Benjamin J. Dichter, cementing his place among the movement’s leaders, Dichter rambled and likened Canada’s western provinces to “a third-world country,” due, presumably, to immigration. In Ottawa, various reports captured maskless protesters brandishing Confederate, Nazi and “Trump 2024” flags.
Dicter, BTW, is apparently an agent with a long past. The author uses him here to equate his calling Canada a 'third world country' with trucker convoy racism against immigrants. Now that's an awfully long stretch. Though one might easily call Canada a "banana republic" today.
The author babbles on, desperately trying to sound erudite, but signifying nothing, like this:
The history of Canadian settler colonialism and public health demonstrates how both overt white-supremacist claims and seemingly more inert nationalistic claims about “unity” and “freedom” both enable and erase ongoing harm to marginalized communities. [Duh?]
But the author's paragraph that has received tremendous attention is the following. Is it wokeness? WEF-ness? WTF-ness?
The primarily White supporters of the Freedom Convoy argue that pandemic mandates infringe upon their constitutional rights to freedom. The notion of “freedom” was historically and remains intertwined with Whiteness, as historian Tyler Stovall has argued. The belief that one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of White supremacy. This explains why the Freedom Convoy members see themselves as entitled to freedom, no matter the public health consequences to those around them.
Someone chose a turgid grad student to float a trial balloon in the Washington Post, to see whether equating freedom with white supremacy would fly. And to see whether you could get away with equating the constitutional right to freedom with white supremacist entitlement.
The morons (like the San Francisco school board members who were recently ousted for excessive wokeness after spending months renaming schools originally named after slaveowners like George Washington) who think we should destroy all historical memories and references to the ancient Jews, Greeks, Romans, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others because they were slave owners in a slave-owning society, have offered no replacements for our intellectual, moral and cultural heritage.
In fact, the Washington Post’s puerile attempt to demean the concept of freedom and equate it with white supremacy--which, btw, has lost its original meaning--hints at a WaPo editorial decision of curious provenance.
Are the editors testing how woke their audience is? How blind, deaf and dumb? Conducting behavioral research? Testing how much crazy talk they can get away with on the pages of Jeff Bezos' CIA newsletter?
Real journalism is mostly dead, actual intellect is demeaned and mocked, and academia these days reminds me of a bunch of petulant 7th graders who can't be bothered to pick up a serious book or pay attention to the lessons of history. Our government is managed by puppets while the puppeteers remain safely behind the scenes, peering out from time to time to remind us they're there. The world has lost its collective mind and those who won't go along are penalized. It grieves me to have lived long enough to see all this taking place in real time. And now that my rant is over, I can't say that having done so makes me feel any better. Sigh.
"Freedom associated with whiteness" ??? Try telling that to Palestinians, or Vietnamese, or Cubans, or Bolivians, etc. etc. etc. and they'd be rolling on the ground in laughter. Or tell to the ghost of Thomas Jefferson! Now: please read this essay by Naomi Wolf
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-canada-the-danger-in?utm_source=url Jon