WOKE-HYSTERIA

The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk has been a revelation, not only to the USA but the West. The murder was followed by much glee from those who consider themselves to be morally superior to the rest of us, and who are treated as being so by the legacy media. The ‘liberal’ reaction provoked a backlash and liberals now regret the open hatred and intolerance they showed. Some even wanted to see more killings.

This should not be dismissed as a mob of hotheads out of control. In fact, there is a method in the madness. Behind the glee there lurks political correctness (the mechanism for the imposition of cultural Marxism), and in particular the Frankfurt School. This was obvious at least from 2016 and Hilary Clinton’s bile during the presidential election. Clinton complained of ‘the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world’ who had ‘stoked anti-immigrant sentiments to win the [Brexit] referendum on leaving the European Union’. Clinton further alleged that ‘The godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism is Russian President Vladimir Putin’, with whom the now President Trump had associated.

Clinton accused that ‘From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia. He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties’. Clinton attacked Donald Trump’s appeal to ‘black communities’ made ‘in front of largely white audiences’ and that ‘he certainly doesn’t have any solutions to take on the reality of systemic racism and create more equity and opportunity in communities of colour’. This, of course, all assumes that ethnic minorities are victims of ‘systemic racism’ and hence that the US society is something bad. Her comment about ‘largely white audiences’ should be noted.

Even Breitbart attracted Clinton’s scorn, given that its head had been appointed Trump’s campaign CEO. She quoted that Breitbart has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as embracing ‘ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Race-baiting ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigration ideas – all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology know as “Alt-Right”. Alt-Right is short for “Alternative Right”. The Wall Street Journal describes it as a loosely organized movement, mostly online, that “rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity” … This is part of a broader story – the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world’.

Clinton accused: ‘White supremacists now call themselves “white nationalists”. The paranoid fringe now calls itself “alt-right”. But the hate burns just as bright’. Indeed, Clinton proceeded to hold Trump responsible for a supposed ‘Trump Effect’, where ‘bullying and harassment are on the rise in our schools, especially targeting students of colour, Muslims, and immigrants’.

Clinton claimed that ‘It’s about who we are as a nation’ and that for her ‘It’s a vision for the future rooted in our values and reflected in a rising generation of young people who are the most open, diverse, and connected we’ve ever seen’. Clinton urged ‘Let’s stand up against prejudice and paranoia’.

To focus on the ideological aspects of Clinton’s ranting, it is merely the clumsy presentation of communist theories. Clinton was consumed by political correctness and had mindlessly dug up and re-hashed laughable and malevolent theories from the early half of the 20^th century, especiallya report called The Authoritarian Personality, produced by members of the Frankfurt School, in the USA in 1950. The conclusion of this alleged ‘research’ is that: conservatives were mentally-defective proto-fascists and should be targeted as priority for attack as they were deemed to be less likely to oppose fascism; children needed to be re-educated; and the only true opposition to fascism was communism, which they tried to pass off as liberalism: ‘To be “liberal” … one must be able actively to criticize existing authority. The criticisms may take various forms, ranging from mild reforms (e.g. extension of government controls over business) to complete overthrow of the status quo.’ A ‘complete overthrow of the status quo’ is not liberalism, but communism.

The report describes what it calls ‘the pseudodemocrat [who] does not now accept ideas of overt violence and active suppression … [but] Undoubtedly very many people who are now pseudodemocratic are potentially antidemocratic, that is, are capable in a social crisis of supporting or committing acts of violence against minority groups.’ It further concentrates on what it describes as ethnocentrism: ‘A primary characteristic of ethnocentric ideology is the generality of outgroup rejection,’ and that ‘The focus of the present study was, therefore, on liberalism and conservatism, the currently prevalent left- and right-wing political ideologies – with an eye, to be sure, on their potential polarization to the more extreme left and right. There is considerable evidence suggesting a psychological affinity between conservatism and ethnocentrism, liberalism and anti- ethnocentrism.’

Of particular relevance is that the report defines conservatism as being ‘to mean traditional economic laissez-faire individualism, according to which our economic life is conceived in terms of the free (unregulated) competition of individual entrepreneurs. Business, accorded such great prestige by conservative values, is regarded as deserving great social power in relation to labour and government’ and that ‘Conservative ideology has traditionally urged that the economic functions of government be minimized. Fear of government power (like union power) is emphasized, and great concern is expressed for the freedom of the individual, particularly the individual businessman.’ In fact, this definition is a biased description of economic liberalism, not conservatism.

According to the report: ‘The ethnocentric conservative is the pseudoconservative, for he betrays in his ethnocentrism a tendency antithetical to democratic values and tradition … His political-economic views are based on the same underlying trends – submission to authority, unconscious handling of hostility toward authority by means of displacement and projection onto outgroups, and so on – as his ethnocentrism. It is indeed paradoxical that the greatest psychological potential for antidemocratic change should come from those who claim to represent democratic tradition. For the pseudoconservatives are the pseudodemocrats, and their needs dispose them to the use of force and oppression in order to protect a mythical “Americanism” which bears no resemblance to what is most vital in American history’ and that ‘This is not merely a “modern conservatism”. It is, rather a totally new direction: away from individualism and equality of opportunity, and toward a rigidly stratified society in which there is a minimum of economic mobility and in which the “right” groups are in power, the outgroups subordinate. Perhaps the term “reactionary” fits this ideology best. Ultimately it is fascism. While certainly not a necessary sequel to laissez-faire conservatism, it can be regarded as a possible (and not uncommon) distortion of conservatism – a distortion which retains certain surface similarities but which changes the basic structure into the antithesis of the original.’

The psychobabble stems from the attempted merging of Marxism and Freudian theories. This was deemed an act of genius, and the various Lefties kept telling themselves this was so at the time. It further facilitated the inclusion of dirty talk.

Clinton may have used different terminology – ‘Alt-Right’ as opposed to ‘pseudoconservative’ – but the argument is the same. It is a communist argument. Clinton also attracted some attention after saying:

‘You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? [Laughter/applause]. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.’

In an earlier campaign, Obama condemned those who he said felt left behind and ‘cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations’.

The Democrats have at senior levels of their party those who hold the values and interests of a very large section of the US population in contempt. Clinton’s ‘Alt-Right’ argument is identical to the communist argument contained in the The Authoritarian Personality from 1950, although Clinton spared us the Freudian dirty words. Then there are the Democrats supporters, who have swallowed political correctness whole.

In The Hegemony of Political Correctness: and the rise of the woke-Right, I highlighted the warning in 1984 from Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector, about the process of demoralisation to which the West was being subjected. He was surprised at the extent to which the USA had fallen under the influence of ‘Marxist-Leninist ideas’. Bezmenov warned that although there were ‘false illusions that the situation is under control, [the] situation is not under control. [The] situation is disgustingly out of control.’

It is now around half a century later. The assassination of Charlie Kirk, the subsequent woke-hysteria and the accompanying celebration and calls for more violence, show how ‘disgustingly out of control’ things have become. President Trump, who was also nearly assassinated on the campaign trail, has started a push back – but there is still a long way to go.

The fight between patriotism and political correctness is the fight between good and evil. It is as clear cut as that.