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America has made a habit of exporting democracy at the point of the bayonet, be it by fomenting war or agitating for color-coded, plant-based revolutions, blessed and backed by the duopoly.
While not as lethal, cultural trends and products exported can be toxic, too. They, moreover, displace and contaminate indigenous culture. To wit, Wokeism is made in America, is entirely toxic, and, sadly, suffers no supply-chain disruptions in its spread abroad.
In case you’re not awake to it, woke is the current state-of-being in America. In particular, to be woke in America is to be anti-white and to be anti-white is to be woke. More so than “in” and “hip”—to be woke is existentially important; it will often determine whether one gets and keeps a job, a social media account, even a bank account.
Although Wokeism is a product of a distorted and deformed American marketplace of ideas—there is always a libertarian who sees a free and energetic agora worthy of defending and exporting, where there is only coercions and cruelty.
“Wokeism has passed a market test,” effuses Tyler Cowen, an economist writing for Bloomberg.com. “The woke movement could be the next great U.S. cultural export—and it is going to do many other countries some real good.”
Yes, Cowen, a libertarian, both explains and exculpates an increasingly entrenched, coercive system of pigment-based prejudice and persecution. “Wokeism,” he further enthuses, “is an idea that can be adapted to virtually every country: Identify a major form of oppression in a given region or nation, argue that people should be more sensitive to it, add some rhetorical flourishes, purge some wrongdoers (and a few innocents) and voila — you have created another woke movement.”
Welcome to the quintessential, collectivist, libertarian Jacobinism—Cowen’s. Omelets can’t be made without breaking the few proverbial eggs. Cowen, like most of his ilk—and against all evidence—also thinks that, “American culture is a healthy, democratizing, liberating influence,” so he wants “to extend it.”
This is of a piece with a libertarian fetishization of any and all market forces driven by the demos, especially economies of scale. No doubt, Cowen would argue in favor of all cultural trash mass produced, consumed and exported by America, because … “market forces.” For example, objectively speaking, rap and hip-hop are gutter culture—and not because of the lewd lyrics bemoaned by conservatives. Say the greatest composer ever, Johann Sebastian Bach, had set his divine cantatas to the naughty lyrics of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—would I decry these heavenly compositions as immoral? Of course not. The music would still be sublime. Rap, very simply, is crap—structurally, technically and tonally. While mistakenly classified as music, it is without musical merit. The rap, hip-hop genre is properly classified as street theater.
The hip-hopster or rapper hoots and gestures obscenely like a primate in heat or in estrus. The movements that accompany the atonal grunts are a simulation of animalistic sex, the call of the wild, if you will. The whole production is as repulsive as it is popular worldwide, courtesy of USA Exports.
Dismissing objective standards for subjective, popular tastes, the Cowens of the libertarian universe would celebrate the rap pollutant because people want it. The market has spoken; it’s popular. Fine. You can just see this economist waxing fat about trade in celebrity flatulence, but why Wokeism? Who loves it? What’s to love here?
Wokeism is not popular with ordinary Americans. Rattling off lists of pronouns hardly gratifies the Pleasure Principle as twerking seems to do. And the list of demands the culture’s kidnappers issue as proof of compliance is too convoluted to catch-on or to matter.
Cowen’s utilitarian case for the market-based legitimacy of world-wide Wokeism is a rickety scaffolding propped up by force: that of the Khmer Rouge-like MeToo, BlackLivesMatter, Antifa and corporate and political enforces combined.
While the hump-along that is hip-hop was voted-in democratically by the consuming masses; Wokeism was not.
Wokeism is a made-in-America deformed form of cultural, even financial, oppression masquerading as social justice. Wokeness is anti-white and anti-straight injustice, shored-up by political and corporate force and institutionalized. No doubt, America’s wokerati have plunged our now institutionally radicalized country into dreary, postmodern deconstructionism and it matters not that the demos is not exactly along for the ride.
Only in America, however, can there be a marketplace for libertarian exuberance about the pox of Wokeism.
WATCH “Exporting Wokeism” on Rumble And SUBSCRIBE
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Gab, Gettr YouTube & LinkedIn; banned by Facebook, and has a new video-podcast.
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Nice libertarian framing there from a paleo liberterian. Way to associate cowens non liberty wokeism with libertarians. Take your trash elsewhere Ilana, to easy to read through your schtick. Everything about wokeism is anti liberty for you to make that play is showing your poker hand. Good luck with those cards.
How come BDS, Palestinian rights, and Palestinian-Lives-Matter are never part of ‘woke-ism’?
Woke-ism is about spreading the gods controlled by Jews: Holocaustianity, BLM Negro Worship, and Globo-Homo. It’s never about what Zionist-led US did to the people of Syria.
Also, woke-ism fools the world because it’s in the language of ‘social justice’. They think it’s about criticism of US power. After all, BLM suggests that US is ‘racist’ and must repent for its sins.
But actually, Jews use BLM to justify US imperialist power. The narrative goes, “Because US is so atoning of its ‘racist’ sins, it’s morally justified to drop bombs on other countries.”
So, you have shabbos goy soldiers painting bombs with BLM slogans and dropping them on Arabs.
BLM is also racial imperialism. It says one scumbag Negro killed by white cops is a bigger tragedy than 100,000s Arabs killed by Jewish-controlled US foreign policy.
Such Negro-Worship is meant to convince all the world that BLACK lives matter more than their own lives Also, in order for them to gain moral currency in the US-controlled order, they must trade in black currency of BLM, aka ‘we support BLM’. So, its black, Jewish, and homo lives uber alles.
Ilana Mercer: “While the hump-along that is hip-hop was voted-in democratically by the consuming masses; Wokeism was not.”
Wokeism is the logical conclusion of Christianity’s cultural influences. Christianity exalts the victim for being ennobled by suffering injustice; in that way he’s Christ-like. Wokeism in its barest essence then is a cult of victim worship inspired by Christ’s words in Matt. 19:30, where the formerly first shall now be ostentatiously put last, and the formerly last are now to go first. Since white heteronormative Americans, even most atheists, are still cultural Christians, they are willing targets. It’s true a few of them protest, but only weakly. Subconsciously if nothing else they are still good Christians and know that they must suffer and admit they are sinners in order to attain virtue; that Gob and his Son Jeebus (along with, perhaps, St. George of Floyd, St. MLK, Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, and others) are looking down at them from on high and expecting them to “do the right thing” and accede to any demand, no matter how outrageous, if only they can be forgiven for their oppressive, sinful ways. They won’t disappoint, because they know that their suffering will ennoble them too. I think they’ll bear it with a Christ-like patience, just as they have all the other indignities they’ve been subjected to over the years.
I’m sure many a woke Leftists have “Free Palestine” bumper stickers on their hybrid car, you’re just looking for an excuse to rant about Jews. It’s a pathology. You see a Zionist boogey man lurking in every shadow waiting to promote degeneracy to the masses. It’s as silly as a Jew who thinks the Boys from Brazil are under his bed waiting to pounce.
And listen to the BBC music critics as they extol, in reverential tones, the intelligence and artistry they somehow manage to discover therein!
After all, it’s a living, and a lot better than being a white-man on the dole.
Thanks for this piece, Ilana.
But it’s never part of official wokology.
Talking about rap (and, yes Bach) gets me going on the terrible state of “music” today where, so it seems, almost nobody can put two proper notes of a tune together – for example, how about “Happy Birthday to You” – as performed at Kamala Harris’ “surprise” bithday party?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2529077/Video-Surprise-VP-Harris-staff-surprise-birthday.html
‘Wokeism’ is Divide and Rule, the oiligarch’s favourite society-dividing mechanism. Justice for all is, plainly, preferable, but the oiligarchs want NO economic or social justice, they want only increasing inequality. How to keep the rabble in line? Make them hate one another, as in the USA today. No lunacy is too extreme eg ‘trans’ insanity with its deranged misogyny, that the weight of money and the employ of a few hysterical neurotics, and MSM complicity, will not force it onto a society that almost uniformly rejects it, while NOT, yet, detesting the poor ‘trans’ people being exploited by Evil swine. So the ‘trans’ performers must get more and more extreme, in order to provoke the required hatred, hence insanities like one group accusing Scottish lesbians of ‘sexual terrorism’ for refusing sexual relations with ‘trans’ ‘women’.
israels cynical support for the lgbtqulmnop is to insure the somnambulistic wokesters side with them and not the palestinians, who are depicted as backward muslim homophobes. they don’t want their apartheid state to be viewed as south africa was and subjected to boycots and sanctions. add to this that criticism of israeli policy is now considered anti-semitism and a hate crime, your not going to be hearing much free free palestine on college campuses or blm antifa protests. don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Yes-the dumbing down to subterranean levels of popular kultur is a prime oiligarch imperative. Reduce popular kultur to hideous levels and you reduce the humanity of those who are forced to consume it. Popular music produced a lot of truly uplifting and skilled performances, over centuries, and still does where the commercial apparatus is missing, but in the West they cannot even manage to express desire and the yearning for love without debasing it to the level of the rut, plus ‘lyrics’ of extraordinary, dehumanising, banality.Sixty years ago the Beatles produced ‘love songs’ of tenderness and respect, while today it is just arse-wiggling and deep knee-bends, with the ‘gangsta’ ‘boyfriends’ looking on without a scintilla of respect or compassionate love to be seen. It is also intended to degrade and brutalise the minority groups at which it is directed.
Stay with japanese and eastern european media.
Sorry, no woke here!
And from every corner of the globe – take the gorgeous 1960s Greek popular music of Manos Hadjidakis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-CQlrRot5s
Or the Korean pop of Patti Kim from the 1970s – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh0mflFrLFg&list=RDEMTN0qwB3o06tsC0S2I7GuWA&start_radio=1
The romance has all gone.
What passes for music these days is absolutely scary. Music started turning to crap as soon as Hip Hop became a mainstream genre. Pitch shifting, using machines for notes, and synthisizing instruments have replaced the musical instruments that make such beautiful sounds and have amazing tones. Listening to the differences between the classics versus a lot of the music now is astounding.