My Blog Week: October 3 to October 9

A Word on the Week

What Comes After Awareness?

Somehow the warning we’ve been given, long past, and several times, is eluding us. The Mueller Report (2019) detailed how many political posts in the 2016 election season were from Russian-based sites, created for the purpose of radicalizing American viewpoints. A week ago, a report in the MIT Technology Review stated that 19 of 20 most-viewed Christian pages on Facebook were run by Eastern European troll farms.

This week was rife with news of Facebook, its corporate knowledge, and its failure to body-block the menace to our nation, by assuming the risk of revenue loss.

Early in 2016, referring to this foreign activity, a phrase came into the national dialogue: Fake News.

With apparently full cooperation by the news media, even those who had broken the original story, shortly afterwards the term was coopted by the Trump campaign, and fake news, rather than a dangerous interference of propaganda, became a medium for agitating the already brain-infested right wing. It grew to a rallying cry to discount all criticism of Trump (including the unbiased presentation of facts the right disliked); a jumping off point for labeling reporters “enemies of the people”.

After a time, the discourse on social media began to include the term “woke”. This was used by Black activists to mean putting aside spoon-fed ideas of a colorblind society, and receiving an education on the depths of systemic racism. Wokeness was seized on by the Fox pundits and trolls as a terrible rights-denying movement aimed at American traditions, synonymous with Communism, a threat to schoolchildren—so that not discussing race gained, rather than lost, traction.

Then came “cancelling”, an idea touted by Twitter users and others, that began playfully enough—the suggestion that a famous person who had been lionized and given a lion’s share of the world’s scarce opportunities, and who had disgraced himself, should be ushered offstage. In the cascade of Me Too allegations, cancelling people became grimmer, but it was the Fox pundits and trolls who whipped it into an attack by antifa, George Soros, BLM, police-defunders, all soon to come after you…a threat to American traditions…

Then came the 1619 Project. With such a setting of the stage, the lunacy broke out with extra rapidity and scant effort to pretend any substance behind the strange arguments, that critical race theory proponents wanted it taught in elementary schools, and that this, by various fulminating Republicans “would never be allowed”.

Four times should be enough.

But let’s ask, why does changing the language attract good liberals in the first place? Why does the left start what is so readily weaponized and used to defeat them?

It would make us feel better, with so many Americans embracing racism, sexism, ageism (pre-Covid, did seniors expect their lives would be proposed for sacrifice to the economy?), classism, genderism, nationalism…to know who is safe and who is unsafe. Rational people don’t, can’t, advocate labeling, demanding that affiliations be stated, oaths sworn before admittance.

But ways exist to signify tribal membership.

One of these is to use the revised correct term. The more mainstream a usage becomes, which would be victory, in theory, the more the nonpure learn to adopt it, for business advantage, for simple acceptance.

By introducing a new term, a sort of purity purge can take place.

Now, as I keep WoWs to around 500 words or less, I’ll break for today, but leave readers with this consideration:

When we begin our fight for recognition and equality with terminology, do we provide low-hanging fruit for antidemocratic propagandists, an easy stirring of passions among the totalitarian-curious, while consolidating for ourselves no additional power?

Proposition: The new terminology is required and must be used by all Worthy, who wish to be allowed freedom of movement and commerce.

If the goal is to enlighten, and generate new rights, does your side win?

If the goal is to divide and generate tribal hatreds, does your side win?