Disclaimer: I enjoy Tim Dillon. I think he’s pretty level-headed and fair in his analysis of politics.
Wow. This post was originally dedicated towards talking about my criticism of Dave Smith but now has evolved into comedians in general.
If this were a book idea, I would call it “Comedians of the bourgeoise & the Jesters Who Hold Court: How Anti-progressivism in comedy supports classical liberal elitism, conservatism and fascism” by Quinton Mitchell.
But I am a busy working-class person, with not much time to do a book now, but for keepers, I am copyrighting that title, just for proof for later if I ever get to it.
This post and idea of a book comes from what I observe with comedians as they rally against “wokeness” (which has some merit), but often ends up eradicating underlying progressive sentiments, and inadvertently or purposefully ends up supporting the conservative status quo.
Comedians, who also moonlight as podcasters, did have some sway on the 2024 US Presidential election. The scope is of course debatable, but to say they had no influence seem flat out false to me. Joe Rogan for example is now under Spotify, which has a net worth of $134 Billion dollars, so of course he, his guests, and others like him have some level of influence.
Sure, comedians/podcasters can dismiss this allegation of helping Trump win, and by dismissing people who allege this it makes it seems like those accusing comedians are just further proof of being “out of touch” or “suffering from the woke mind virus”, yet comedians are also lavishing in the attention that they possibly DID have impact.
What I just said here reminds me of the recent Tim Dillion interview on CNN with Elle Reeve. First off, I don’t hate Tim Dillon, and, I think he has a fair approach to analyzing both sides of the political spectrum, but he does like the finer things in life, often talking with a slight sense of Gatsby-like outsider-peeking-into-the-rich analysis with his stories centering around the “WASP-ey” nature of the Hamptons as juxtaposed against the out-of-touch “white” privilege and dramatics of blue collar Long Island.
Dillon reminds of the something akin to the punk-of-the-elite class-which-therefore-makes-you-not-punk mantra of Brett Easton Ellis (a MAGA supporter), but Dillon is nowhere nearly as elitist and nostalgic as Brett East Ellis in my opinion. Dillon and I are Millennials more impacted in our developmental years by turn of the Millenium events (e.g., 9/11, War on Terrorism, The Great Recessions, etc.), whereas Ellis is true Gen-Xer who was raised in a time of “America not questioning” itself commercialism of the 1980s and 90s. If anything, Dillon still believes in some sort of grassroots hope without being fully nihilistic towards progressive sentimentality, despite his sometimes-dystopian analysis of life under late-stage capitalism. Dillon actually has self-awareness unlike many other Rogan-sphere comedians. I think Dillon stands on his own and I feel bad even linking him to Rogan.
Dillon also seems to be trying to hold court with those in political power such as with RFK, Jr., and his wife, and did have a slightly smug dismissiveness about the allegation that comedians helped Trump win in the interview I referenced on CNN.
Whether Dillon wants to admit or not, I think he – and by extension his comedian “Rogan-sphere” buddies – saw this CNN interview as a crowing-achievement, because A) it must have been personally surreal for himself to be thought off as a serious person to “the establishment”, which lays the impetus for more comedic inspiration for himself going forward because the whole event can thread upon irony and ridiculousness, and B) it gives him a consciousness-like, Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club “Project Mayhem” sense of glee, knowing that he and his comedy buddies are in part sticking it, or capable of sticking it to “the man”.
For example, Dave Smith in a YouTube video titled his video “Tim Dillion Embarrasses CNN” which goes to show how they see the establishment, but for Dave Smith specifically, is his wrath is dedicated more so towards the current “liberal” (i.e., Left Wing) establishment, and I say this because Smith and many other “free speech” comedians, seem to not be attacking the Donald Trump Administration as much as they could, except for maybe on America’s support for Israel in the Gaza War, but this to me is more so a trendy thing to do for them to gain sympathy and appropriate leftist positions (e.g., Theo Von crying about Gaza on his podcast, just to go to dinner with Jared and Ivanka Kushner, where both of them fund Israeli settlements on contested Palestinian lands).
But, don’t get me wrong. CNN should BE CALLED OUT. CNN can be very embarrassing, considering by proxy it is seen as a type of “left wing” news outlet, but the issue to me is that comedians often in this lingering anti-woke regime, forget to call out the absurdity one can see daily in the conservative media. Tim Dillon, Andrew Schulz, etc., calling out CNN is not bad, and could be coming from a place of wanting them to do better, but even if that we the case, the fact remains that the “focus” is still on what we consider to be Left Wing. I think this is important to call out because not focusing on the conservatives gives them a sort of pass. As a result, I think a lot of people feel they are in this suspended animation of absurdity. Trump’s lies, cruelty, and truth bending seems untouchable while we all still unnecessarily debate the philosophy of “wokeness”. Who cares anymore. The constant attacks on wokeness are really a form of kicking people while they are down.
My observation is that comedians found the Left Wing to be easier targets, but now with Trump in power, doing all sorts of ridiculous things, it seems that many “anti-woke” comedians all of a sudden have “writers block”.
Trump is literally (1) claiming white South African farmers are going through genocide – which is a popular white supremacists’ myth – to distract from the point that his administration is funding the actual ethnic cleansing of Gaza, (2) Trump is hosting Trump meme-coin events, thus selling his title as President and pimping out of the Oval Office, (3) the Jeffrey Epstein Files, which people in the heyday of Qanon lunacy used to attack the political-left – largely because of Bill Clinton’s relationship with Epstein, despite Trump knowing Epstein too- are still not…public despite a disastrous attempt at doing a “public unveiling” featuring stochastic terrorists like Chaya Raichik of Libs of Tik Tok, etc. (4) Trump literally has “slave patrols” chasing down migrants, and whether we agree to disagree about the legality of their status (e.g., yes, coming to the US without permission or claiming asylum is a crime), we should hopefully be able to agree that the heavy-handed “Gestapo” like strategies of detaining people – many of whom are hardworking, tax paying and law abiding – is excessive force, and ironically obfuscates from the fact that capitalism benefits from often low-wage labor.
Or let’s go simpler…with that being that eggs are still high (as if it’s not a joke already that Presidents can’t control egg prices, and the fact that eggs spiked in prices due to an Avian Bird Flu pandemic).
Switching from Dillon to Smtih, I believe that Dave Smith is nothing more than MTV generation Republican who uses libertarianism to sound counter to narratives of power, but the underlying ideology of libertarianism naturally supports the elite status-quo which causes the wars he claims to be about. Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Smith can’t honestly say that Communism has caused any wars. What is causing them is the territorial and self-preservationist natures of nation-states, often ruled by an elite class of wealth people – getting into hot wars or cold wars over influence, resources, etc.
But comedy’s current overemphasis on wokeness forgets that wokeness is really a strategy of progressive ideology but not progressivism overall.
Wokeness in a very simplified definition could be explained as: (1) employing a combination of intersectional thinking which is an analysis of power along the intersections of various identities, (2) having an intolerance towards intolerance – which seems counterintuitive, but intolerance towards bigotry is an effective weapon against the status quo who wield both capital and state-violence, and (3), and has philosophical roots in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the works of Herbert Marcuse such as One Dimensional Man or Eros and Civilization, with the latter analyzing the subversive nature of capitalism and convenience via socialization, control, etc.
This is very gross over-simplification, but I think these are three core tenants. I didn’t list Marxism because wokeness despite being left-wing oriented in how we understand it in contemporary society, can be distained by people in the Far Left (i.e., those who feel identarian politics erodes class solidarity and, if anything is a weapon employed by liberals to balkanize class solidary) or by the Center-Left (who often see wokeness as counter to the “do what thy wilt” nature of liberalism, often focusing on free speech debates). But wokeness can be defended by from people within both camps. So wokeness is not inherently “communist”. It is really a worldview, framework, strategy, style, mantra, sentiment, etc., rather than an ideology. To be honest, you can allege that many people on the political right are “woke”, and these people are conservatives who simply complain or call-out the actions of the status quo, but don’t actually want it to go away.
Libertarians are effectively…woke conservatives. They’ll talk about “CIA, Operation Gladio conspiracies” here and there, they may smoke marijuana, they may sprinkle in Anti-George Bush and Dick Cheney throwbacks, and maybe, just maybe, might criticize police for excessive force (despite them liking cops as being defenders of property rights), but at the end of the day, they are…conservatives, and Republicans.
But regardless, even if there were flaws in the strategy of wokeness, it doesn’t mean progressive ideology is bad, but the goal of these comedians is to make it seems they are one in the same.
What these comedians are doing, is no different than what conservatives such as Jordan Peterson attempted to do by liking progressivism with “postmodern Neo Marxism”.
Jordan Peterson lazily (and with the help of meatheads like Joe Rogan), pitched the very Nazi-like idea that progressivism was explicitly “postmodernism” in nature, or as he put it “Postmodern Neo-Marxism”. This insinuates that the wants and needs of groups outside of “in-group”-oriented hierarchies as somehow espousing a dangerous “dada” nonsense.
Feminism, LBGTQ, diversity, environmentalism, etc., based on Jordan Peterson’s biased explanation of postmodernism (amplified by Joe Rogan’s platform to millions of listeners), means that these groups and the wants of these groups are unnatural, relativistic, and possibly even a “Jewish” subversion (with the latter being allegations espoused by the Nazis, American Paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan, and the more recent Alt-Right).
To go a little off course, but when thinkers like Peterson revive old tropes of “Cultural Marxism”, which always morphs into the horrid nature of antisemitism which I consider to be Jew hatred and blaming of Jewish people, but not a criticism of the state of Israel. By Peterson opening up the Cultural Marxist pandora’s box, he, even as a Pro-Israel, Christian-adjacent classical liberal (conservative), is able to help the State of Israel, because the antisemtiism they helped unleashed, helps Zionists organizations clamp down on free speech and criticiams against their colonial conquests against Palestinians. It is a very sinister strategy where you (1) promote antimsetimic tropes to help reinvigorate white supremacy though pulling Center Right politics more Far Right, and this Right Wing sphere includes the Evangelical Christiains who want Israel restored for their own religious propgheic reasons, but also, (2) promoting antimsetimsim allows Pro-Israeli groups, companies, think-tanks, etc., clamp down on speech agaisnst ISarel by alleging its antimsemitic. This also allows these Zionist groups to have more of a disporortionate effect on American life such as schools being threatened with defunding if they don’t support Israel, people being fired from jobs, or companies not getting state grants or contracts if htey don’t pledge to Pro-Isreal Anti-Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) laws.
Truly, an evil double whamy, entrendre, what have you, we live under.
But back on course, from Dave Smith, Bill Maher, Tony Hinchcliffe, Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz, Tim Dillon, etc., are “defenders of classical liberal” traditions such as individualism and free speech, yet classical liberalism has been fully assimilated into the existing capitalist structure, thus naturally creating classism, imperialism, wars, etc., despite these comedian’s beliefs that they are countering state power with free speech.
As a result, I consider comedians like this to be Jesters of the Courts of Kings. Court Jesters could be an esteem tradition in the barbaric Dark and Middle Ages if a person was good enough. Not wanting to back to poverty, or get their heads chopped off, they would pander to the rich while at court, helping to justify the system as is, which was a feudalist system where elites were ordained by God to bind people to the land in exchange for “protection”, but a protection ironically from those elites themselves who had the power (with the exception lords may protecting serfs from highway bandits, when they weren’t acting in the capacity of robber barons I suppose).
These comedians’ free speech advocacy, which often centers around making fun progressives who are critical of existing hierarchies, is in a “snake that eats its own tail” feedback loop., because their comedy ends up supporting those at the top, while dismissing the grievances of those at the bottom, and when they do reach down to elevate the grievances of those at the bottom, it is often those at the bottom who still stuck in mental control that favors the rich, conservatism, etc.
Bill Burr is the most famous comedian who taps into true grassroots, blue collar, unintellectual progressive sentiments, which is why conservatives were so terrified of him. He is not only a white, straight guy from a culture ingrained in American lore as being romantically blue collar (i.e., the Irish), but uses his positions in these “privileged intersectional” boxes to call out the conservative status quo. Bill Burr threatens the status quo, no different than how when Republicans lost their minds over “White guys for Harris” during Kamal Harris’ run. The status quo knows that straight, white men are the buffer demographic needed at keeping things essentially the same for a very few amounts of people.
Yet, these comedians I am referring to will obfuscate from the fact that they are doing anything wrong by alleging that grassroots (and often monetarily broke) progressives are the “real elitists” as a means of pitting them against the everyday moderates and conservatives who are still largely living in their own denialism about how the capitalist system is exploiting them.
Comedians therefore can be weapons to help divide the proletariat working classes, so they never develop enough class consciousness to overpower the manager, owner, corporate, and elite classes.
Therefore, these comedians are…jesters holding court. Having made some money off Netflix who took risks on their careers by releasing their so-so comedy specials, but also having made money off pall-wall Patreon accounts or from the YouTube Google Paid Partnership Program algorithm, many of these comedians, who were once average joes, are in the upper middle class to lower rich brackets, and they don’t want to go back to where they came from. So, it seems the more they make it to the top, and I often saw this in Andrew Schulz, is that end up in this increasingly isolated “HBO Entourage” fantasy, where they are now the cool kids, and if they say anything ridiculous which gets criticism, then it is some people hating on them (literally, “They hate us, cuz they ain’t us” saying).
They get close to power, hoping to be let just a bit further into some secretive enclave, that they kind of sell out, but to distract from that fact, they simply base their entire comedic identity around pointing out what they see as “Left Wing hypocrisy).
On Dave Smith’s beliefs, which to me is a good start at calling out what I consider to be this “classical liberal apologia within comedy (which always ends up supporting the status quo), is that Smith calls himself a libertarian, but he that he defines himself as this because “the state represents violence”, which to me is a corny co-opt because one could in reverse provide a counter by stating “uncontrolled humans are innately violent” and stronger people or groups of people will target weaker people.
Also, I am not a pacifist. I aspire to be, but I am not one because peace isn’t something that naturally exists in nature, notably human nature, so taking the high moral ground of calling oneself a pacifist is nice, but in reality, has no substance. If anything – for better or worse – the freedoms of people are in protected by the possibly of violence. Pacifism though a something to aspire to, isn’t how the world is, and if the Dove Left or Libertarians got their way, they would likely create such as power vacuum that things would more violent sooner than later. A problem, with Libertarians and the Dove Left, is that they naturally assume that the United States is to blame for everything, and this often morphs into “Far out Man” “Blame the CIA” for everything arguments as if everyone other nation on earth doesn’t have their own self-preservationist attitude and realpolitik.
Government as a concept is not bad, and yes, government does have a monopoly on state-violence, so we as individual people aren’t exercising vigilante violence, based on our own subjective belief systems.
One could argue (and I admit that am oversimplifying things here for the sake of brevity) that government is one of the oldest human concepts we have as a species, in which humans ceded their personal freedoms to create a truce that was held firm by some sort of higher force needed for the arbitration of issues. Other species have something we could make the comparison to as a government, i.e., a social system of rules and truces that governs behavior.
From elder members of tribes to Kings, to elected representative bodies, we have had some level of government, because government essentially represents consensus, a body to establish truces, and an organ to uphold standards.
Sure, governments being comprised of people can be corrupted, but if anything, that’s a people problem, and not a problem with the concept of government.
Further, Dave Smith’s libertarianism provides him an easy way to win arguments by taking a non-interventionist and pacifist approach, notably by calling out the State of Israel in its treatment of the Gaza Strip in which the IDF is treating the entire area and its peoples as supporters of Hamas. Yet even though what the IDF is doing is unfortunate and is a clear example of what colonialism looks like, and sure, the United States helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia is not out of kindness but rather helping to sustain American hegemony, still, Dave Smith’s libertarianism doesn’t counter state-power, but rather enables the forces of wealth disparity via classism, that eventually hijacks governments to create the wars — often for conquests, market domination, and resource extraction – he claims to be against.
His libertarian ideals emphasize private property rights, which therefore evolves into a society of wealth-disparity since some will always own more than others and eventually monopolize markets and use government to help protect those monopolies.
Libertarianism is essentially capitalism, and capitalism, imperialism, etc., have been the impetus for wars of conquests, resource extraction, slavery, human trafficking, etc. Capitalism does not admit it does these things, because it’s not an actual person, but an idea, but the people implementing and advocating for the idea of capitalism often obfuscate from the negative externalities of capitalism, rather instead giving a “rising tides lifts all boats” Milton Friedman-like cop out.
Dave Smith is also on this bandwagon on anti-wokeness (which has made comedy predictable) and seems to employ what a lot of other current comedians are doing, which is what I call “Gotcha, see, you’re a hypocrite” angel to comedy, notably targeted at Liberals (who do corny things such as performative Civil Rights while continuing to support economic systems, that their conservative opposition benefits from), and the political-left. For example, there is a trend of calling out liberal elites (i.e., your Center Leftists, modernist liberals, etc., who compromise with the political-Right in order to prevent socialist economics undermining private property rights that disproportionately benefits the wealthy) and the Left (i.e., those critical and sometimes fully opposed to liberal economics, i.e., capitalism).
So not only does he have a political ideology that favors the rich naturally, but he also basis a lot of his comedy on calling out the hypocrisy of the only counter to conservatism, where conservatism is unapologetic in its belief in free-markets, hierarchies, etc. Sure, call out hypocrisy, but I don’t think that’s what he’s fighting, but rather he’s fighting for the preservation of the economic system as is, which means there’ nothing really revolutionary about his beliefs at all. Just because you get rid of government doesn’t mean that the majority of people’s lives will get better. If anything, it may get worse. Libertarians are at this point a weaponized ideology of think-tanks and organizations who provide intellectual top cover for elitism and wealth disparity. People like Reagan and Nixon called themselves libertarians to my knowledge because it was the fashionable thing to be in post-WWII America as it became more popular to rally against New Deal Era social programs.
How it is punk to be a libertarian, when people like Reagan would call themselves that? Libertarianism is nothing more than an ideology of apologia for private property which naturally favors the elites, business and mercantile classes. It is the higher-brow, bow-tie Ivy League variant of anarcho-capitalism.
Also, why is libertarianism also the preferred ideology of racial (notably white) supremacy and separatism? Because it provides intellectual layering of people’s internal desires and fears, which is anchored in racism, sexism, etc. Better put many conservatives aren’t libertarian because of the high-brow, debate-club talking points they say, but often it is about maintaining a hierarchy based on race, gender, sex, etc., and they see government regulation and interventionism as counter to their wants. But libertarianism provides a “high horse” position by alleging it is simply about maintaining freedom. Sure, it may be maintaining freedom but maintaining freedom and being a humanist are two different things.
Sure, Dave will probably allege that he is a purist when it comes to his beliefs and that his beliefs have been invaded and ruined by others, but even that would be a cop out.
Generation X and Elder Millennial Libertarians in my view, coming from a person in my late thirties, are what I MTV-generation Republicans. They were raised on Reaganomics and Clinton Neo-Liberalism, but to save face when George Bush Neocons started ruining the planet (destabilizing the Middle East and helping cause a decade long Global Recession), they distanced themselves from standard Republicanism and called themselves libertarians because it was cool to do so. The Tea Party movement and the presidential campaigning of Ron Paul also led a lot of people into libertarian ideals. Paul often seemed like the rational one in a room because he was anti-war but also anti-regulation, yet the flaw still remains…. with that being that power can accrue in the hands of a few even if you get rid of government, and nothing may change for the better, and may get worse, because there’s no government recourse to challenge those with dipropionate power.
Many of these Libertarians were also raised with a pre-existing libertarianism from the mid-20th century hovering the background which included the thoughts of Murry Rothbard-inspired extremism (who was a Jewish man who had odd links to white supremacists), a Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell intellectualism of the 60s and 70s, and also a good dose of American Southern-oriented “State’s Rights” Jeffersonians (i.e., often Southern libertarians who used Thomas Jefferson as the basis for their ideological stances on segregation, states’ rights, etc.).
Figures such as MTV’s Kurt Loder was an example of the “hip libertarianism”. Don’t get me wrong. Kurt Loder who I grew up watching as the “smart guy” on MTV who gave it an air of journalistic integrity, seemed like a nice guy and I want to say him beliegn a libertarian in his heart was coming from a good place, however, I would argue the idealism of libertarianism, simply ends up supporting the status quo as is.
I suspect Loder’s libertarianism was based on the Baby Boomer rejection of the stuffiness of suburban conveniences, which later found existential catharsis is the lyrics of Lou Reed and Velvet Underground during the emergent punk scene, post the failure of the hippie movement, with bands like The Stooges, Television, those of NYC CBGBs, etc. Essentially, libertarianism of Loder’s day could be seen as punk, but really it wasn’t. It felt punk maybe, but how punk could it really have been if Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago was winning a Nobel Prize for basically promoting “Greed is Good” during the same late 1960s to early 1980s timeframe. The wish fulfilment of Milton was the Reagan 1980s.
Loder helped inspire Fox New’s host, Kennedy.
Kennedy therefore leads us to “Republican Comedy” shows such as Red Eye and Gutfeld!
Greg Gutfeld of course calls himself a libertarian too…
Dave Smith has of course been a panelist on Gutfeld’s shows.
The truth of the matter the older I get and the more I get tired of analyzing the system is that liberals and conservatives are the same, and both are the biggest hinderances towards a true progressive future, which I feel can only happen underneath some sort of true Left-Wing ideology.
To me, conservatives are simply “classical liberals”, where what we call liberals in contemporary speech are “modernist liberals”. Both are liberals in that they have a core philosophy centering around private property, markets, individualism, and the “Devine Rights of Man” (inalienable rights), but classical liberals (conservatives) inspired by people such as Edmund Burke still favor classes, traditional, religion, etc., and feel that human nature itself (the invisible hand, i.e., human chaos) will somehow solves things, whereas modernist liberals (liberals in our modern day lexicon) inspired by Oliver Wendell Holme’s “living interpretation of the US constitution”, and the philosophical school of Pragmatism led by figures such John Dewey, have a hands-on (real hand versus the invisible hand) approach. Science, managerialism, psychology, etc., are more so utilized by modernist liberals in applying classical liberal presuppositions.
Yet, both are liberals based on that classical core tenant of beliefs.
My belief is that only true Leftist ideology can reform society at this point because liberalism, and notably neoliberalism has reached its inevitable conclusion, which is corporations replacing the state that represents all peoples in theory such as through privatization of services, and the fact that wealth is already so much in the hands of a few people (the game has been won) that economic mobility for the vast majority of people is either impossible, going to get much harder, or will only be sustained by those in power manipulating from behind the scenes to prop up a system that requires belief in them still holding onto power. For example, as technology and AI literally gloats about replacing people’s jobs, the fact still remains that people still need to pay bills and rents since even living is a for-profit enterprise under capitalism. Captialism running out of things to do, so can only recycle itself to stay relevant (for example, promoting anachronistic fashions to keep consumers interested), promote forced-obsolesce (ensuring things break more easily so you have to keep buying that thing, i.e., reducing quality), promoting subscriptions to unlock extra features in products people already paid for, etc. This is why Universal Basic Income is gaining traction. It is not about creating a post-capitalist utopian state, but rather maintaining the hierarchy as is, but why an agreed upon amount of state generated “play money” to keep propping up belief in the current Monopoly Game we are enslaved to. Liberalism like Marxism are both idealistic utopian ideal, even though Orthodox Marxist won’t admit it because they consider themselves as “true realists” because of dialectical-Materialism, etc.
But liberalism like Marxism posits itself on a belief that their specific idea will lead to a utopian version of the future, where Marxist believe in a collective of the proletariat will get us there, whereas liberals believe that individual will get us there.
The same fallacy that Communists argued when by claiming the state would wither away after the “dictatorship of the proletariat” took over to implement a “classless, cashless, stateless society”, can too be found in capitalism (liberalism) where this fallacy somehow believes that rich people winning the game of capitalism will…somehow give up their wealth for a utopian future for everyone, or, I guess the masses will be better off peasants than previous era of peasants if only a few winners of capitalism stay in power?
If you step back, you notice that the Far Right and Liberals both agree on destroying the only reformist ideology which can be found the Left.
From anti-woke comedians to the liberalism of Cenk Uygur Young Turks or steamers such as Destiny, to the Far Right from literal Neo Nazis to the general and Right Wing with figures such as Ben Shapiro, Jillian Michaels, to think tanks, to bot armies, to God knows what else… is that there is a war against the Left.
I call it full spectrum cross-divisional (both left and right) liberal warfare against the progressive Left.
Was wokeness annoying?
Sure.
But I felt I grew as a better person because of it.
A lot of people hung up on wokeness as the culprit of the world’s problems are those who never cared to really care about what woke progressivism stood for or was trying to do, but tapped into their own sense of victimhood by alleging they got cancelled by the “woke mob”.
Like I can’t imagine being a main in 2025 who still angry and afraid or triggered by feminism, even if an individual triggers you. I say this because even though individuals in the left may be very annoying, rude, hypocrites, themselves…so what? That’s a “them” problem, so I am not going to throw feminism, or LGBTQ, or fellow Black consciousness thinkers under the bus because I get their goal. My support for progressivism is not based on transactional relationships but rather a belief in the transformational nature of it. It’s simply the right thing to do, and yes, I am making a firm objective truth claim on what is right and wrong.
For example, it is the right thing to support women in supporting women, and I have to accept that it may not include me, and if anything, always may be mistrustful of me as a man. It is what it is. Patriarchy has given them every reason to feel a certain way. It sucks. Sure, there will be bridges between us possibly, but maybe me being supportive of their self-determination is the simply the only thing I can do? It doesn’t mean my life is over, especially on matters where emotions may be involved. Sure, if I am accosted by a person on a person-to-person basis, then yes, I will defend myself, but I am not simply going to throw feminism under the bus as being the root scourge of modern problems. I apply the rhetoric to other things to.
The goal of conservatism is to make it seem that what is now is natural and not a construction. It’s easier to be a conservative. It’s safer. It’s tempting as a result. Maybe the Left needs to realize that people have a propensity for simple thinking and easy living, and, yes, we have natural insecurities which sometimes intersectional conflict brings out to people’s dismay? The Left is not perfect, but still there are the only force that can reform their current neoliberal globalist regime we labor under.
A part of me thinks that we weren’t woke enough, if the result was Trump or JD Vance.
Regardless, for example, I admit there was a time where I thought this woke ideology was explicitly Communists, but then I grew out of that because it’s not about the strategy but the underlying sentiment that underrides that strategy. And even if were Communists…so what? Communism has an analytical tool against capitalism is not the same as living under a totalitarian communist regime.
I don’t see the woke era as a bad thing but rather something that push conversations forward, however, a society as a tolerance point, and those who espouse woke ideology (though I support them) should respect that. Wokeness was most so about pushing conversations forwards on the hopes of achieving materialist gains. Sure, we’ve talked a lot, but we still don’t have…. Medicare for All, legalized weed, a fair immigration system, and if anything, rights have been LOST.
Identity politics is not bad, but it’s how much we focus on it. The Left can have both class solidarity while also factoring in intersectionality, but to me it’s how much emphasis at the forefront do we put on identity. Identity is easy to me. Talking about it, analyzing it, etc., is easy, cheap, and often can lead to nothing beside maybe Behavorial modifications to how we treat each other, but often talking on identity all day everyday does nothing but create a few hyper-successful voices who become the leaders of their tribal groups, but nothing is actually changing. If anything, fatigue kicks in, and those who wanted a better world, drop the Left, and go back…to suburbia or the system as is.
It happened in the 70s and 80s after Civil Rights and is a happening again, and this attack on wokeness is a sign of that. Liberalism coopted and destroyed anything revolutionary, and created a newer type of inclusive liberalism. A new update to its software, rather than anything in the underlying code structurally being changed.
This is something the left needs to work out, but you better believe it that the opposition will do as much as it can to promote disunity.
But as I end this, Andrew Schulz, another comedian, interviewed Bernie Sanders. This may seem random, but Andrew has said certain controversial things to some that have gotten him into “hot water” as far as Twitter goes, but Bernie is slightly disappointing fashion was pushing this “wokeness as a problem” trope, to the glee of Schulz and his friends.
I feel Bernie did this being an old guy and little out of touch about the deeper nuances of online conversations and controversies, but I also think that Bernie is unfortunately adopting a liberal and Right-Wing framing of wokeness, as it being some “ridiculous” strategy. And, sure, as I’ve admitted, wokeness was not perfect, but in the case of Schulz is that Schulz was really wanting top-cover for anything he may have said that pissed people off. By getting Bernie to agree with him to varying degrees, it somehow alleviated Schulz from anything he said, because both he and Bernie pushed the ideas that “woke” type of Left are more problematic than good.
Me hearing Bernie on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant 2 Podcast, to me means we need younger blood and this why Alexandia Ocasio Cortez is so important and why the system fears her. She would have pushed a bit more than what Bernie was capable of doing.
I truly think the system is afraid of AOC and if these comedians are truly free speech, I think Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz, Theo Von, etc., should host her.
Mitchell Research Group 