The New Authoritarians
Our WOKE overloads have become the Trumpian nightmare they warned the world about..
…After Trump’s election, many commentators expressed anxiety that his followers would plunge the country into far-right authoritarianism. Instead, it is the class of college-educated Democrats that now openly argues for the value of blind submission to authority and the elimination of personal freedoms. The trend Lasch wrote about in the 1990s has metastasized. It no longer poses a mere threat to democracy—it has become a full-fledged attack on basic democratic principles. Far from upholding civil liberties, the self-proclaimed “resistance” to Trumpism has itself exhibited many hallmarks of authoritarianism: suppression of dissent, demand for unquestioning obedience, and tight control over the flow of information. While scapegoating Trump supporters, a nexus of billionaires, woke corporations, public intellectuals, and Democratic officials have sparked the very descent into authoritarianism they claimed would emerge from the populist right.
…It is also the inevitable outcome of a discourse that allows some of the most powerful people to depict themselves as helpless and persecuted. When The New York Times editorial board recently decried the culture of “social silencing” that has permeated most American institutions, some prominent progressives were incensed. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose election to Congress was powered by the most gentrified neighborhoods in her district) argued that only the left is subject to real censorship, and that concerns about cancel culture are merely “about protecting bigots from feeling embarrassed in public.” Ocasio-Cortez seemed to forget that she has explicitly advocated for censorship herself on more than one occasion. In 2019, she called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to “take down lies,” and in 2021 she pressured Apple and Google to remove Parler, a social media service popular among conservatives, from their app stores after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t think she’s calling for real censorship because she believes that the entire political opposition is composed of violent domestic terrorists bent on killing her. (She was not in the Capitol building on Jan. 6.) It is precisely her self-image as a perpetual victim that allows her to justify a tyrannical approach.
DO read it.
Nanny State | tree hugging sister | 
June 16, 2022 3:37 pm
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And that’s just from the Never Trump / Corporate Conservatives.
They really are the biggest obstacle to cleaning house.
The author of this excellent article, Alex Gutentag, has, herself, been banned from Facebook, for posting a comment that questioned the sanity of giving Covid shots to infants. She didn’t post disinformatin, but simply questioned the FDA’s basis for approval. The ban was lifted a few days ago, thankfully.
What a world we live in.