We all know that the number one feature of being Woke isn’t thinking “correctly” or even acting “correctly.” The number one job, the number one aspect of Wokeism is the witch hunt. It’s getting other people busted for NOT thinking correctly or acting correctly.
We see this all the time. It’s the going after advertisers mentality, the eviction of Parler thinking. It’s Brian Stelter using his Fat Dumb and Bald podium to advocate government driving his competitors out of business and exclaiming that the Freedom of Speech doesn’t really mean FREEDOM of speech. It’s renaming schools named for someone who just had the same last name as someone else who was deemed racist.
And it is of course, exemplified by the Twitter mob. America’s cops, who will find, arrest, convict, and punish anyone they deem less woke. They use it as a weapon against people they are mad at. When someone succeeds, the first thing Wokes do is go try to find something, anything, to indict them over, going all the way back to their childhood if necessary.
Some people are safe from the pitchforks and torches — for now. But not as many as you’d think. Take New York Times science and health reporter Donald McNeil Jr. as an example. McNeil was just fired for violations against woke-ism, after a 47-year successful run at America’s top liberal rag.
Here’s what he said about the incident that led to his firing.
“On a 2019 New York Times trip for Peru for high school students, I was asked at dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur,” he explained.
“To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself,” he continued.
“I should not have done that,” McNeil wrote.
“Originally, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended. I now realize that it cannot. It is deeply offensive and hurtful. The fact that I even thought I could defend it itself showed extraordinarily bad judgement. For that I apologize,” he continued.
He UTTERED a word, he didn’t USE it. There IS a difference. And I mean that in the objective, literal, definitional and real sense. In Woke theology, there is no difference at all.
Speaking about the apology, writer Andrew Sullivan wrote that “This reads like a confession procured by the Khmer Rouge. It’s both ridiculous and terrifying.”
“It is now official NYT policy that for some words, intent does not matter, and it only takes one strike to sink a 47-year career,” said Reason editor Matt Welch.
Jesse Singal, formerly of New York Magazine, currently (controversially) of Substack, today re-upped an article written way back in 2017 about the state of affairs on the Woke Left. “The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats,” he says. “Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense.”
The article, titled “Planet of Cops“, was written by Freddie deBoer. Both of deBoer and Singal are liberal progressives. And yet…
The little army of snitches who have written to my employers and tried to divest me of my job. The self-appointed Twitter police — they’re in every subculture of that forum — who constantly start shit, DMing people to berate them for who they follow or whose work they boost, the ones who keep an oppo file on everybody, who try and regulate other people’s friendships. The ones who keep a big file folder of screen grabs, just waiting to play judge and jury. They’re cops.
That is exactly what so many of us, particularly here at Right Scoop, have been saying, which I said above: that they make their mission to seek out and destroy.
Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.
That’s it in a nutshell, and the firing of McNeil was a perfect reason to reup the article.
Now I’m sure big time progressive libs hate to see a right winger like yours truly agreeing with them. But that’s the shape of the boat and it can’t be helped. It’s a serious problem in America. It affects both left and right, in some of the same ways and in some very different ways, especially regarding outcomes.
A lot of libs who may be sympathetic to the Singal/deBoer position overall probably do NOT consider the platform banishment of Parler or Trump or Hawley to be a good example. But all three very much are good examples. Because it’s not just a concern of going after good guys with tiny infractions inflated to drama. It’s also about the mentality itself.
Thought policing isn’t new, but it is always bad, and it always has been.
Singal document dumped the letters to the Times on the case of McNeil. Keep in mind that he was first reprimanded, and only fired AFTER these letters.
2/ Among many other interesting aspects, two things that jump out at me: that professional journalists would put their names behind completely vague, unsourced (but serious) claims, and would treat an alleged lack of belief in white supremacy as worthy of seeking HR intervention. pic.twitter.com/Y8EOHGqPwp
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) February 6, 2021
McNeil was their lead reporter on Covid-19. So much for “the science” I guess.
Woke justice is mob justice, not social justice. And it results in actual, literal mobs. It’s a dangerous time in America to disagree with the mob.
UPDATE: Wow, look at this nugget from the Daily Beast.
McNeil’s behavior on the trip had been hotly debated among Times staffers, including some who took part in a meeting with Baquet and assistant managing editor Carolyn Ryan last Friday. At that meeting, Pulitzer Prize-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones said she planned on calling the parents and students on the trip to determine what McNeil had said and in what context, according to people familiar with the situation.
1619 Woke in Charge of Orthodoxy Nikole Hannah-Jones just decided to make it her business and they all went along?
You think this kind of hostage-taking is limited to the Times? It ain’t.