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--- politics:philosophy:shadowpolitics [2025/03/23 05:26] – ["Wokeness" and the Rise of Fascism] Owen Mellema
+++ politics:philosophy:shadowpolitics [2025/03/30 16:18] (current) – [“Antiwoke”, Transgenderism, and Pedophilia] Owen Mellema
@@ Line 155: / Line 155: @@
 In 2016, I predicted that a billionaire, influenced by right-wing propaganda, would take over a social media website and spread right-wing talking points extremely far and wide, kickstarting an explosion of right-leaning people, including fascists. This uncanny prophecy, which seemed unthinkable at the time, came to pass in 2022, when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, renaming it X. Now Elon, who, for lack of a better word, seems to be completely deranged, is running the show, and seems to be boosting his own tweets and the tweets of right-wingers, retweeting literal nazis. As I predicted, fascism entered the mainstream.
-===== Fascism, Transgenderism, and Pedophilia =====
+===== “Antiwoke”, Transgenderism, and Pedophilia =====
-Now, I must address the “antiwoke” crowd. You’ll notice that everywhere I have used the word “woke”, I have enclosed it in quotes. The reason for that is that term almost has no meaning. I previously described it as “illiberal progressivism”, but that’s just my particular way of thinking about it. The fact is that “woke” is a meaningless word. It has no definition, and thus anything could be considered woke.
+Now we must consider the other side of the political equation, that is, the Right. It seems to me that there are about six segments of the modern Right, give or take:
-Naturally, “antiwoke” is an extension of the previously existing conservative movement, but it is different in many ways. The same force that produced overt nazism in a subset of the population also pushed conservatives toward a form of fascism — Not the “Jew-hating, Hitler-loving” kind, but rather exhibiting a variety of the common signs of fascism. For instance, scapegoating minorities for the nation’s problems, encouraging a powerful leader to take total control of the government to solve said problems, a general “ends justify the means” attitude, abandoning empathy in favor of a Nietzschean “the weak should fear the strong” philosophy, a general love of cruelty, etc. I digress, this is not a critique of the right, just an explanation of why, while I think the neo-nazis and the anti-wokes are different, they aren’t that different.
+ - Concerned conservatives, whose allegiance to the Trump regime is predicated on its support of certain issues, such as abortion or immigration
+ - The MAGA-Loyalist crowd, who hangs off of every word that Trump says
+ - Fascists, Racists, Authoritarian Aesthetes, Psuedomarxists, etc
+ - The “traditionalist” crowd
+ - The amoral crowd, who disdain all forms of morality as social control
+ - The Neo-Reactionaries, occultist intellectuals who encourage the birth of oligarchy.
+The last five groups mix and blend together, at times more distinct from one another, at other times indistinguishable. It’s a huge tangled mess of ideas, often contradictory, but all united in opposition to one thing: “wokeness”. This is what I call the “Antiwoke Right”.
+You’ll notice that whenever I use terms like “woke” and “antiwoke”, I put them in quotation marks. I do this because the word is really only pejorative, and no one opposed to “woke” can even attempt to give a coherent definition of it. At least with fascism people could point to an actual thing that existed at some point, whereas “woke” is nothing more than the vague notion of a thing. This vagueness is what allows for the “antiwoke right”  to stick together despite being composed of many contradictory notions. “Woke” can, and does, mean just about anything. It means masks, the belief the vaccines work, the idea that the earth is round, the notion that science is the best way to approximate truth, etc. It doesn’t help that many of them are anti-intellectual, meaning many don’t even consider a coherent worldview a worthwhile thing to have. (Furthermore, the plurality of types of rightists lends itself to an incredibly diverse array of notions — which effectively doesn’t matter, because they will ally with each other anyways)
+While the “Woke Left” mainly critiques power structures, then the “Antiwoke Right” mainly critiques so-called degeneracy. “Degeneracy”, like “woke”, is a word that has no meaning, thus, it really is only a gesture at a feeling of disgust, “wrongness”, decay or general non-conformity. You might notice a big problem with this — people have different opinions on what is disgusting, for instance. One must remember, however, that being a shadow of the Left means that it is the Left’s true enemy, meaning that it is opposed to humanism (the idea that humans themselves have value), and thus they are apathetic about fairness, equality, or human dignity. So, the real shape of the movement is opposition to things that //this group of people finds disgusting//, and that they must also take power, so that their standard of wrongness becomes the true standard of wrongness.
+Consider an ugly person. We can’t help finding the person ugly, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t extend the same cordiality to them as we do to our fellow man. We do this because we believe in the basic notion of universal human dignity, that everyone deserves to be treated equally, on the basis of their actions. It’s difficult to imagine a society in which it would be considered not just socially acceptable to be cruel to ugly people, but socially required, as a form of group participation. Yet, the “antiwoke right” is already engaging in this form of group cruelty. In the same way that we could say to be engaging in “performative virtue” in our treatment of ugly people, it may soon be that we will engage in “performative vice” in our treatment of them. I have called this “vice signaling”.
+In the same way that fascism is the left’s shadow because they are inescapably authoritarian, degeneracy is the right’s shadow because they, themselves, are inescapably degenerate. In the literal sense, this group of people want us to “degenerate” (ie, to regress) backwards, away from the shining beacon of “The West”. Consider, for instance, anti-intellectualism. Part of what made the west so powerful was our beliefs in certain ways of thinking, such as rationalism, and the triumph of reason over blind faith. And yet, the right is increasingly skeptical of the institution of science (critically, they are critical of it without offering a real substitute).
+Furthermore, the idea of degeneracy is, itself, degenerate. It is the base instinct of disgust taking precedence over our higher virtues. In this way we quite literally regress to the level of the uncivilized savage, who acts on emotion without thought. And, of course, it must be pointed out that within the “antiwoke right” there are contingents of people who lack any sort of moral conviction or fiber — in my above dissection of the right, I call this group of people the “amoral crowd”. Even outside of this group, many do not take pleasure in the higher art of the West but rather continue to consume facile forms of entertainment.
+I don’t (necessarily) say this to levy a criticism of the “antiwoke right”, but rather to explain its obsession with degeneracy, and why “the degenerate” is the shadow of the group.