For some time I have been speculating as to when we will reach Peak Progressivism. What with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez barelling into American political culture like a Trumpian stampede of bullish memes, we have reason to think it is a long way off, far into the future. The Democrats have at last found their anti-Trump, a masterful manipulator of minds who gains attention by setting aside factuality, practicality, careful morality, or political etiquette — all irrelevant! With AOC the Democrats seem prepared to “run train” on the American system of government. But that is probably wrong.
Peak Progressivism hit its high point last Saturday, with the social media paroxysms over Nick Sandman’s “smirk,” his red hat, and his and his buddies’ “obvious” racism and sexism.
And Progressivism has been plummeting since.
Can it recover?
Pride Goeth Before the Fall
I do not always get these viral manias right.
A few years ago, I pretty much took the progressive side on police shootings, for instance. And though I do think cop culture is in a pretty bad condition in America — it cannot be good, with the unconstitutional War on Drugs corrupting everything — the infamous Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown brouhahas fizzled from scandalous injustices and into justified shootings lickety-split. Progressives just did not notice, so em-bubbled were they.
Now, I never really believed the Trayvon story, and I think I may have got the Brown shooting not wholly wrong from the beginning — but I must surely have taken the wrong side in some of the other hysterias that led to the rise of BLM and BAMN.
The point is this, regardless: repeatedly since Obama the Corrupter took office, and even unto the present moment, the big race/sex-gender/bigotry scandals almost invariably turn out quite unlike how the progressives tell the tales. The stories do not pan out. The oppressor-victim narrative of social justice usually proves brummagem. Progressives somehow prove prone to invert the truth, in both facts and values.
My instinct, these days, is to take the opposite side of whatever progressives are angry about.
And, unlike Scott Adams, I never believed that Master Nick Sandman was in the wrong last Friday. It seemed easy for me to see that Nathan “Respect Me I’m Old and Native” Phillips was the aggressor. I could tell by his stance and the nervous look on Sandman’s face. I was sort of surprised that this was not universally understood.
I was surprised that Adams was taken in.
Maybe I got this right because of my “Finnish-American” cultural angle — when I see someone pounding a drum in someone else’s face, I regard the Drummer, not the Smirker, as the aggressor. It was not likely that Phillips was “defending himself.” Or interposing himself between the kids and the Black Hebrew Racists, I mean, Israelites. People need their personal space. The kid did not look like an aggressor at all. I am sort of dumbfounded that anyone would judge otherwise, even with Sandman “smirking.”
Do folks not know what a nervous smile is?
And do you remember Orwell’s 1984? We are talking, here, about “facecrime,” a subset concept of Newspeak.
The other day Adams apologized. I am watching his apology video, below, as I type this. Next up I will watch his latest, “a rip in the fabric of reality” lecture. I am told it blows the social world wide open.
Mr. Sandman, Lend Me Your Ears
Again, I dare say that Peak Progressivism hit us square in the face on Saturday. It has been all downhill from Sunday on. And will continue, if not quite so precipitously.
Why? Well, we can only trust social justice mobs so many times only to be repeatedly betrayed . . . before we realize that social justice is pure moral poison. It clouds minds. It destroys judgment. And it becomes precisely what SJWs say they hate.
The indecency of the Blue Checkmarks on Twitter was breathtaking to behold: death threats; calls to burn down the Covington high school with all the students in it; offers of blowjobs for punching Sandman. Cray cray crazed nonsense. Vile slander. Evil wishes. Murderous rage.
Justice is what matters. Justice. No modifier needed. “Social justice” is not sociable, is indeed anti-social — it is worse than a mirage, it is mob-based tyranny.
And my prophecy is this: if Democrats nominate a candidate for the presidency who sticks to the social justice lingo, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, that candidacy will fail to oust Trump, or whoever in the GOP winds up replacing him. (There is still the possibility that Trump will not run again. I know: unlikely. But how likely is Trump in the first place? He is, as I said several years ago, The Mule. Straight out not of Central Casting but from Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation.)
The demise of a party may be at hand — and because of racism, the Democrats’ racism! Anti-white racism. Their need for an excuse to rag and rage on heterosexual white men, in particular, is ugly and stupid.
And now almost everyone can see it.
I really thought, ten years ago, that it would be the GOP that would implode. Right now my money is on the Democracy.
What remains to be seen is if the cultural hegemony that leftists lord over the rest of us goes along with the current idiotic brand of social justice. It might. It just might.
