Locked-Down Life

I wanted to try to parse this a little, if possible. One of the strangest things I’ve seen in my adult life is the leftist side of the political sphere turning against the working man and woman. To give context, in the 2000 election, the Bush vs. Gore election, I voted for Ralph Nader, as a protest vote. I recognized even then that the two parties had a strangle-hold on the American imagination, on the possibilities. I never thought Nader would win, but I certainly couldn’t vote for the buffoon George W. Bush, and I had pegged Al Gore as a milquetoast and a liar. Nader had built his entire reputation on taking on corporate and government power, and I still think it’s one of the better votes I’ve ever cast.

If you’ll recall, George W. Bush won that election and went on to become a two-term president, which is still one of the most laughable things I’ve ever seen, because the man was an empty suit if ever there was one. You could watch his brain try to process words in real time, and boy, conservatives just ate it up. He’s one of us, they thought. Except, he was from a wealthy Texas family with deep political connections and an Ive League pedigree, but they still loved him because he acted stupid all the time. It was hard to unsee that, how easily conservatives were fooled. To this very day, I know you can’t trust conservatives to ever figure things out, and if there’s one single most stupid interpretation of things, that’s the one they will jump on. Every single time.

So, I understood that conservatives aren’t the way. They fawn over power too much. There used to be people like Nader, though, leftists who took on power. They didn’t speak about race or sexual minorities except in the sense that Blacks, say, obviously occupy the most slots in the American underclass. Plenty of whites are there, too, but a load of blacks live there, and it was fairly easy to see that school funding tied to property taxes gave blacks bad schools with no tax support compared to their wealtier neighbors on the good side of the tracks. That’s obvious, and it still is. Nobody ever talks about that, though. Nader talked about it, but mainstream polticians never did.

Used to be the conservatives who sat in front of the television and catalogued all the things that went against their Christian sense of morality, which then turned into calls for censorship. It was always the conservatives doing that. You can’t say this. You can’t say that. All based on some moral reasoning that conservatives wanted to foist on everybody else. In teaching, I couldn’t talk about things like sex and sexuality, gay marriage, abortion, things like that, without drawing the ire of administration. Even as recently as 2015, Gary Spears, the president at Northwest Community College, bullied the school’s librarian into taking down a display about gay marriage, which I have from the horse’s mouth. I was good friends with that librarian, and Spears ended up dismissing her because he disagreed with her politics. Spears was a special piece of shit, actually. He bullied me into taking down my column I wrote for The Daily Journal in Tupelo because I took leftist positions. Old-school leftist positions that had to do with the ecomony, with schools, and things like that, things in the Ralph Nader vein of activism. When I sponsored a chapter of the Secular Student Alliance, that adminstration started to work against me, actively. It was a really awful place to work.

In online atheism circles, I witnessed the first movements of what we can now call wokism. We didn’t have a name for it, then. Online atheism was a lot of fun for a while. It saw itself as fighting for reason in a world locked down by the likes of Gary Spears. But, something happened around the year 2012. The wokists infiltrated online atheism, and shattered it into a thousand pieces. You know the drill. These identity-obsessed women and their white knights started accusing everybody of being a racist, a homophobe, and they started instigating purity spirals and cancelations. PZ Myers comes to mind as a central figure in that. His blog had been about atheism and science for a long time during the golden age of online atheism, but it shifted overnight and just started calling everybody a racist. People who saw things through a class filter, that it wasn’t race as much as everybody against power, were dismissed as infidels. It was crazy. I’ve been wanting to write about that phenomenon for a while, and maybe eventually I will, but suffice it to say, for my purposes here, online atheism was the canary in the coalmine for wokism. It was one of the earliest communities that got busted up by identity-obsessed wokists. To this day, it has not recovered any of its energy.

I’ve long believed that wokism was theorized and implemented to bust-up the Occupy Wall Street movment, which I still believe had a lot of potential, but it was crushed. Wokism, which still hadn’t been named back then, was unleashed on that mob as a social contagion, and it transmuted class-grievance into race-grievance. This turns out to be a really good way to separate white people from black people, and also gay people from straight people, and so forth. Everyone’s grievances are celebrated, and the white person is always cast as the villian. That’s really the beauty of wokism, that it manages to cast the white working man and woman as villians, and simultaneously conceals big power, which is why people can, with a straight face, believe that someone like Alexadria Ocasio Cortez is good and virtuous, but the working man is the enemy. It’s fairly incredible, when you think about it.

But here we had something really bizarre, and really different. It turns out that is isn’t just conservatives that vote against their own interests and buy-in that a guy like George W. Bush is just one of us. It turns out that leftists go for this, too, and quite easily, once you cast everything as racial. Leftists believed, I think most sincerely, that someone as connected as Hilary Clinton was just one of them, and so they failed to recognize that Donald J. Trump represented something of a screwball that the establishment didn’t want. That takes us to the 2016 election, the most unique election of my lifetime. I’m still a guy who sees class as the defining problem, and here I have more of the same. I know I can’t vote for Hilary Clinton, but Trump struck me as a a buffoon, so I sat out that election and just watched it unfold.

From there, I watched the mainstream media call Trump a Nazi for four years, play every woke card in the deck. That’s when it was impossible to miss that wokism was a tool of the powerful elites. They didn’t like Trump, and they wanted him out. Talking about Covid and George Floyd feels like too much to go into here, but suffice it to say that both of those brought wokism to it’s fever pitch. The shift in academia was stark. All of the sudden, you could not do straight class analysis anymore. Whereas under the conservatives, you couldn’t teach about the abortion issue because you might offend a conservative Christian student, now you couldn’t teach it because you might offend a wokist student. Critical thinking was impossible. Wokism infiltrated every single American institution, from the Federal government, to universities, to health departments. Everything. And remember, wokism is just a tool of the elites that is used to disrupt solidarity among the American working class.

So, that sort of brings us to Trump 2. What is happening? Wokist institutions are now under some kind of backlash. Trump has removed DEI from the federal government, and he is trying to clean up the military. This Hegseth guy, all tatted up and saying all the right things, gives conservatives something to glom onto, and they will, of course, which leads me to believe that big war may be on the horizon. These sorts of shifts always have a greater purpose and they are never organic, not when it comes to the feds. There’s a reason why racial grievance is being challenged, and I suspect it is to draw those conservatives back into the fold, somewhat, so that they’ll enlist again.

I woke up this morning remembering a book I read back in the 2001 aftermath of Gore vs. Bush, by Sam Smith, Why Bother? Getting a Life in a Locked Down Land. Locked Down, in 2001. What strikes me is how absolutely nothing has changed since then. We still have no conversations about the plight of the working man in America. The housing market is completely out of control. Health care is still a disaster. People are still one major illness away from bankruptcy. Schools are still tied to property taxes. The Universities are still captured by wokists, and they are entrenched, so you really need to get them out and restore the Universities back to their truth-seeking missions. I do not think it is possible, though. Point being, the USAID audit highlights that America is a far richer nation than just about anyone realized. This government could be reconfigured to serve it’s people. It could be. Why isn’t it? But further, why are so many resources devoted to concealing that? How did it get to be this way?

One thing I know for sure is this: America doesn’t really have a left, not the Ralph Nader truth-to-power left that it so desperately needs. Wokism took the left out behind the shed and put it down, and we’re not going to get a resurgence of the left under Trump 2. I like the man, if I’m being honest, but he’s no leftist. This is what scares me about the future more than anything else.