Free Speech Union: Is there a Left way back from Woke?

[VWdieselnightmare]

I stumbled across this video of a discussion held by the Free Speech Union. It's an interesting topic that covers a lot of ground. It contains some excellent material from Alice Sullivan and I was particularly taken by Alan Sokel's analysis of how and why GI has got such a foothold in academia.

He starts talking about it at around 30 minutes. He talks about why middle class white academics are drawn to GI as a means of discounting and ignoring and sneering at the views of the vast majority of ordinary, non-academic working class people. He sees it as the ideology of the left-wing professional and academic classes who can congratulate themselves for being deeply concerned about the most marginalised group in society while proudly riding roughshod over the rights of women and others. I think anyone who's been following the Jo Phoenix ET will instantly hear the voices of Jo's critics when he talks about the class issues. I think it's also closely related to Brexit and the way the Brexiteers were portrayed.

Nothing that hasn't been mentioned here before but expressed in a way that I understood it clearly.

I look forward (?) to watching this.
This is all effectively a creed. More than a religion, more a purity test. They can pass it, but noone else can.
Noone else would want to, so antithetical is TRA to the natural order of things.
It's also caste system, taking the creed of high "worth" concept, and using it as a way to create heirarchy.
It also then generates the fuel for endless purity spirals, as adherents feed the downward bearing on skeptics.
And in place of ultimate salvation in the next world that characterises Christianity, the salvation here is immediate, in this life, as the adrenaline of social control is the reward.
Just see the insufferable behaviour and fake virtuousness of the OU rabble poised over Jo.

Just a slight warning: Umut Ozkirimli is a giant-egoed prat and tries to pick a fight and play 'I am right, you are wrong' with those who disagree with him, but gets put in his place by Jan. There are shades of Malcolm Bradbury's 1975 novel The History Man...

Just watched the first hour, and so much to digest.

Love Alice's overview and fully feel her frustration and surreal insanity at the very thought she's a Nazi, fascist etc. Especially her take that TRA is a pure American concept leeched over here, a concept from a country riven by an evangelical religious origin, huge disparities, and polarised politics at a level we in UK can't imagine.

Alan Sokel's take (from 31'), that this is a religion of the professional managerial classes PMCs. Really speaks volumes.

No disrespect to anyone on MN who belongs to the PMC, but it's effectively a group who make nothing of value, add nothing of value, effectively contribute nothing to society
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No PoC, gay, woman, poor person, ever had their life improved one iota by a PMC.

DEI could DIE tmrw, and no one's life would substantively be affected. Yet, they call the shots.

And because they're infused into cultural institutions, especially academia and health and education, their agenda has become our agenda.

And their "game" is two-fold. To firstly virtue signal us, their rules must be our rules.
Because they don't add a cent or penny of worth to society, zero value or growth or knowledge, their contribution has to be wider and deeper, the very morals and principles of how society is run. Otherwise, there's no point to their existence.

And by creating the most puritanical set of rules, that keeps them busy in administering them.

And then just as importantly, there is intra class doctrinaire behaviour, this is what another MNer got me thinking about, the caste system within the PMC.

Now you can in real time move yourself about on the Intersectional Game Of Life, choose the best Intersectional Top Trumps card, to position yourself into an advantageous higher caste.

I see this as particularly attractive or relevant to women who've gone all in, they get status and authority in ways they might not have done in the old world. Check out the females testimony in the OU v Jo Phoenix case.

And then there's the PMC underclass, those aspiring to have careers in stuff like DEI etc. The diversity statements that they are obliged to present prior to even getting a job interview, means the wheat is sorted from the chaff, adherence to the new fealty is guaranteed, and the poorly paid intern or DEI trainee can feel part of the club, but also show they're more sainted than the poor up and coming plumber or van driver.

A group who add nothing of relevance, wealth or emotional value to the West, are more and more in charge of its social policies and it's ethos. It's all they have to offer. And it threatens the very order of society.

I'm glad you found that class analysis interesting. It was what really stood out for me. How it gives the PMC the platform to deplore the GC (and particularly the working class) who don't believe in gender. So a mediocre academic can use accusations of transphobia to bring down eminent colleagues. I think it's the best explanation of how Phoenix, Stock, Favaro and all the other academics came to be persecuted by their nice, middle-class, super-caring, righteously punitive colleagues. I've heard the theory before but Sokal's version of it seemed better-communicated than most. Thank you for spelling it out at length, RealityFan.

All these virtue-signalling true believers, most of whom are straight white folk, are using the TQ+ for their own ends. I don't believe half of them really care a fig about the lives of transpeople or the effects of transitioning kids. Trans people are a useful weapon that can be wielded to destroy colleagues and stop useful research that might throw a spanner in their own work.

One of the earlier OU witnesses was furious that he hadn't been consulted about the formation of the GCRN (which he was campaigning against) because he wasn't consulted about it prior to its announcement. He said it might have offered career opportunities that were denied to him because he wasn't GC. These people have seen how the TQ+ offers an opportunity, and they've taken it — like the men who've taken the opportunity to self ID as women to get into loos and changing rooms, to get into lesbian events, to destroy women-only spaces. They are abusing the very people they claim to support.

One of the lessons I'm learning, and learning fast, is that genuinely principled people in the professional managerial classes are hard to find, and that there is genuine malice in seemingly the most innocuous of apparachiks, politicos, and even academics.

I've always given people the benefit of the doubt, even when they're telling me who they really are.

To some extent with Brexit and populism, but massively in this area, I'm finally waking up and smelling the coffee.

Until recently, despite my nailed on GC credentials, I've still looked for altruistic motives, I do believe one shouldn't automatically assume the worst motives in others because you can't then complain if they assume those about you.

And I still think that much of Gen Z sees this as their SJW movement, protective on their trans friends and fellow students. And some Millennials/Gen X, and a smattering of older Boomers, see inequalities they wish to fight.

But more and more, a word is coming into focus, thru the haze and fog and mire of obfuscation, and doublethink & triplespeak, and purity spiral bullying.

GRIFT.

This is this Professional Managerial Classes grift. In the past grifts might have included Farage telling people voting Leave was going to lead to £350m per week extra for the NHS and fewer migrants. Or any number of other things.

But this grift is a grift in purest form as the protagonists indeed do all personally benefit via position, status, caste, influence.

The fact that the grift is toxic to women and children, this doesn't even bother the professional women pushing the grift. They're insulated from the effects of the grift on other women by dint of their elevated status.

No public toilets or changing rooms or refuges or mixed NHS wards or prisons would ever be on the cards for a Nicola Sturgeon, Caroline Lucas, Harriet Harman, Theresa May, Caroline Noakes. The female academics up against Jo Phoenix are also protected by their caste. Indeed, they're obligated to prostrate themselves in public to say the most outlandish stuff, to cement their status.

And as VWdieselnightmare says, the guarantee of never ending and lucrative work is the reward.

Yes, a speaker at Filia made the point that Sturgeon, Starmer, Harman et all don't use public facilities. They'll go to their private health clubs when they want to swim. Many of them will have private health care because, being Important People, they don't have time to queue and deal with the labyrinthine structure of the NHS. Their children are likely to go to private schools. These bastions of the left, therefore, won't have to face a transwoman in their communal changing room or deal with a school, like my local one, that is having a transgender awareness week that includes GI being taught in every lesson/ subject every day for a week — except Maths, apparently. They haven't found a way of training Maths.

Maths? They're working at it. Wasn't there a "numbers are imperialist racist concepts" story I read recently? And in US, schools are dropping algebra from the maths curriculum because poor black pupils are flunking it.

It's hard to know how to fight this, it's become entrenched at levels that can't easily be disentangled. Even a generation of rational young people coming thru now, how would they en masse show any resistance?

“So a mediocre academic can use accusations of transphobia to bring down eminent colleagues. I think it's the best explanation of how Phoenix, Stock, Favaro and all the other academics came to be persecuted by their nice, middle-class, super-caring, righteously punitive colleagues.”

For me, where that “it’s all the fault of that group over there” analysis falls down is that, in reality it isn’t a matter of “PMCs” versus “non PMCs” (which you would expect with class analysis)m as Phoenix, Stock, Favaro etc are all PMCs too.

So I don’t see how identifying in-fighting within a class counts as class analysis.

“A group who add nothing of relevance, wealth or emotional value to the West, are more and more in charge of its social policies and its ethos. It's all they have to offer. And it threatens the very order of society.”

Hmm. Isn’t that the kind of rhetoric that dictators would indulge in before embarking on a campaign of mass executions of the intelligentsia?

I'm pretty sure that at some point everyone on the stage laughs and acknowledges that they are part of the PMC and that it all applies to them, too. Just because some despot somewhere has used the argument to have people shot doesn't mean that there may not be some useful observations.

What does stand out is how bad at managing so many of the managers on display here and in other ETs have been. All of them, to quote another poster, have slopey shoulders. The HR person last week hadn't even read JP's grievance and delegated to people unknown and then washed her hands of it. IF should have taken control of the situation but like everyone else involved, took the easy route and hoped that JP and the problem would go away.

Would removing many of these managers make things worse than they are currently?

No, no shooting please. However, pushback at some point is inevitable. What's needed right now is a ton of sunlight to be shone on a movement that never had public backing (noone asked for DEI or CRT/GI to be inculcated in institutions), and then a political party, likely The Conservatives, will have to provide a compelling narrative for change.

Matthew Goodwin of University Of Kent posits that over a half century, the political composition in universities has gone from rough parity between Left and Right views, to way over to the Left. To the point where Conservative and/or Brexit supporting faculty keep their mouths shut.

In some areas, like anthropology, there are 50-100x the number of Left staff to Right. Only in STEM subjects do things begin to even back to anything close to a 50/50 split.

This cannot be healthy. Even if you don't go as far as believing there is a consensus of progessives busily purity spiralling their errant colleagues, this lack of variance of opinions can only lead to inertia, lack of originality and cross fertilisation of ideas, and incestuousness that breeds contempt and suspicion of anything other than progessive Left groupthink.

And thence to dissing the unwashed masses in the population who just so frustratingly will not kowtow to such brilliant ideas as de-colonisation (even less popular now watching Hamas practice the policy in textbook fashion), defunding the police etc (out of the BLM playbook so beloved by Left activists and caste PMCs), critical race theory (out here we believe in colour blindness, not a newly codified anti-white racism), and our favourite here, critical gender theory/ideology (because in the land of reality, away from the dusty theories of Judith Butler and post modern "icons", women are fully aware of the first and in many ways most relevant reality based class struggle, against men, not some VR view of an idealised utopia of women and gentle GRC-laden souls all in it together against the dastardly Andrew Tate types).

All these virtue-signalling true believers, most of whom are straight white folk, are using the TQ+ for their own ends. I don't believe half of them really care a fig about the lives of transpeople or the effects of transitioning kids. Trans people are a useful weapon that can be wielded to destroy colleagues and stop useful research that might throw a spanner in their own work.

I don't know that I think they are mainly straight white folk, except insofar as the nation is mainly white, and the middle classes somewhat more white. (I think that non-straight people might actually be slightly over-represented in the middle classes generally, and this group in particular.)

Adolph Reed in the US talks about this phenomena is a way that I think is to a large extent mirrored in the UK. He points out that there is a large, and growing, black middle class in the US, and the economic interests of these people are not the same as those of poor white people. They are the same as other middle class people. That isn't a bad thing particularly, but it means that it is an error to imagine this group defined by race has a united economic interest, and to some extent the other kinds of social interests can follow that divergence.

He points out (rather cynically, but he is a Marxist so I guess that's par for the course) that it is to the advantage of this group to pass themselves off as representing the black community because it allows them to influence policy.

He also says that among this largely university educated group, race activism has become a significant career path for a good number, so making sure there are jobs is going to be important to them.

I think this is where the question of intra-class backbiting comes in - and maybe this is an area where traditional class analysis tends to be overly romantic - there are only so many positions to go round, and keeping them going means making sure institutions that hire such people keep on believing. Heretics, like Stock et al, threaten the whole edifice. Poor white people can just be brushed off as bigots (though why this is so effective I don't really understand), but this is also why non-white or homosexual non-believers come in for such vitriol. They destroy the illusion of solidarity among the "oppressed" groups represented by the PMC leaders..

I'm thinking Umut is right in saying the great divide, the main class seperator, is education.
Blair was right...Edukashun! Edukashun! Edukashun!

It may have been money or family lineage in the past. But those "blue bloods" have been on the wane for some decades now. New Money has run society for several decades now, it's now time for New Leftism.

At this point in time, and developing for some decades now, is education, and the right kind of education, as one's roadmap to influence in elites driven society (ie the professional managerial classes). Look at the state of apprenticeship training in this country, laughable for time at least Tories have been in. Blair was complicit too, it was all about the magic barrier of 50% of 18+ going to college, not that the country cried out for plumbers and care workers etc. The scam and curse of that 50% is coming to fruition as DEI soaks up graduates with few life skills, no obvious jobs, and extended debt... who's gonna say no to a woke DEI related job if the market doesn't want your Gender Studies degree? Oh, sign your diversity statement to get that interview.

Because the West is now global (so many more Western middle classes come good, are able to run the mantra "Have Laptop, Will Travel" and work anywhere, even outside the UK) and allied to this, and contingent on it, is our post-manufacturing economy, as we've offshored all our making of things to China/SE Asia and other developing world.

That means eg the coal miner, who was an absolute icon of Britain as a country that created wealth by getting it's collective hands dirty, is now a distant memory, and carving an NHS out of nothing is an achievement of a bygone age.

Now, the middle classes absolutely rule strategically, as we become a society that purely manages the machinations of every day life, and media/woke hyper corporations rule commerce.Blairs codified human rights law and overqualified and underskilled 50% graduates market, now sealing the deal.

As Western societies give up substantive manufacturing and even cultural goodness (Marvel films power Hollywood), the professional middle classes via PMC fashion the terrain and the rules.

And thus power is wielded thru regulation on language, which has dual results of corralling us miscreants, and ensuring those in the system fly in the same direction, and fledgling PMCs (our Gen Z going into college and coming out with law and media degrees, and increasingly medicine ones) have nowhere else to go.

And because communication is even more Marshall McCluhan relevant than it's ever been, any dissenters ie GC women, white, even more so PoC and/or gays, have to have their English Literature marked, given straight fails, but a resit is always possible, and a pass given, if you tailor your answers "correctly".

Education, more than family wealth or skin colour, now matters the most. Because society is now in the hands of the most educated, yet if OU testimony versus Jo is to be believed, such a manicured and cultivated education ain't worth jack shit on the outside of these previously trusted and respected institutions.

I mean, Big Money people don't need to have university degrees.

It's the large number of people in the middle. Who are, perhaps, conscious of the possibility of losing the status they have?

It's interesting to consider how these middle management institutions are constructed though. Many of the people in them don't believe any of this shit and would like to be rid of it. But they can't really act effectively and they of course need jobs.I know so many in education, the civil service, medicine, who see what is going on but just try and keep their heads down and deal with the real work they are supposed to be doing. Yet if they all kicked off they would be a force.

I’m working my way through watching this and finding it very interesting - thanks for posting the link OP 💐

They haven't found a way of training Maths.

Oh, I could work it into Maths in so many ways. A terrific vehicle for percentages and pie charts, for example. It’s a good thing I’m GC.

I'm glad this has sparked some interest. Are you an academic, RealityFan? Thank you for your input. You have a far clearer understanding than I do. I'm just feeling my way, unlike those of you who think about things like this every day. I don't immediately know when I hear their arguments where the speakers are positioned (which school of thought/ political view they are coming from etc) and so I'm having to piece it together.

I'm very mindful at the moment of how universities are businesses. My nephew's girlfriend has been talked into doing a Film Studies MA by a tutor who assured her she'd be eminently employable at the end of it. I tried to suggest she gets into HR: it seems like a busy area with lots of possibilities.

Nope, not an academic, just a jobbing therapist. But I've taken a bigger interest in this than I have on anything outside my core activities in my work, my hobbies etc. Maybe I've read too much? I don't know, I often think so.

For me, this has triggered so many thoughts and reappraisals. From how snipey I was about women's rights as a younger guy. To just how fragile free speech and the defence of it is. To the religious impulse that seems to run deep in humans, whether Christian or post modern identarian. To the need to take a stand. To realising all previous marks of being Left or Right are now inapplicable, how a new politics is needed.

And most of all, for me personally at any rate, how I more and more feel liberal humanism as the impulse that has guided us, either doesn't have any answers to this blind alley/dead end we've found ourselves in, or worse still, is complicit and directly responsible.

Ie gender ideology/critical race theory, is not a bug of fifty years of a post Christian society, it's an absolute feature of it.

Little did I guess that 15 months of CBT to help me manage my reactions and emotions around this subject would lead via immersion into MN to a deeper soul searching.

All I know is the meaning of life cannot be an ideology antithetical to all that's good in humankind, run by individuals whose only purpose are to serve themselves.

What do you recommend reading? I've got Pluckrose and Lindsay's Cynical Theories here, waiting for a free couple of days.

I have been meaning to read that myself. Jonathan Haidt's/Coddling Of The American Mind really left a big impression on me. Alan Sokal in that video also mentioned another book of his.

I'm not sure there's a lot on meta analysis of the deeper bureacratic roots of this movement, it's success is due to how silently and seamlessly it's all happened, over several decades.

And because the Conservative Party has lost its bearings, has no philosophical rigor, it's been the proverbial chocolate teapot level of use since 2010 in providing any kind of resistance or alternate model.

Imagine watching old episodes of Yes, Minister reconfigured for 2023, with Jim Hacker been given the total runaround by Sir Humphrey on Stonewall indoctrination in the civil service. Hacker would be scampering about, always missing a pronouns rollout, while Humphrey would be knocking back fine port with the Nancy Kelley character, laughing at how easy it is to run rings around Hacker, and how stupid the British public are.

A bunch of white folk using ‘woke’ as perjorative. 🙄

I'd say any movement that replaces colour blindness with anti white racism, destroys the sex based rights of women and celebrates teen medicalisation, is indeed pejorative.

Whether it's white people making this claim or not is irrelevant.

Come on, you can do better than that. I think Omut actually talks about being told he's white while being discriminated against because he's Turkish and therefore not white. What do you have to say about that? What did you make of, say, Sokal's analysis? Let's have some real debate.

VW, don't hold your breath. And I love the way we're all assumed to be white. Amazing really, I never judge anyone this way, but some people are happy to. I thought we were meant to be past making lazy assumptions predicated on skin colour etc. Obviously some people don't make just lazy assumptions, but also ones that are half asleep.