RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://christopherrufo.com/p/what-comes-after-woke?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Rufo: There’s an interesting argument that I’ve heard articulated from several people, including my colleague at the Manhattan Institute, the social scientist Eric Kaufmann, that we are entering a stage of “post-progressivism” or “post-woke” or “post-DEI” America. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but there is a kernel of truth that the Left itself—after ten years of woke, from the rise of Black Lives Matter in 2014 to Donald Trump’s victory in 2024—does acknowledge that we’ve entered a different phase. But what comes after woke? Is it a return to the economic Left? Is it the rebirth of Occupy Wall Street? Help us set the stage.

Lomez: I see a couple figures that represent different forks in the Left’s contemporary development. There’s Zohran Mamdani, who’s doing this kind of pragmatic woke fusionism or something. It’s distinct, I think, from AOC and Elizabeth Warren-style DSA politics. It’s also distinct from Bernie Sanders’s politics, although not that far from him. I think Mamdani is closer to Bernie than many people grasp.

On the other side, there’s a faction of the Left that is represented by people like Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Derek Thompson. Klein and Thompson wrote a book called Abundance, which has become a sort of flagship text of a post-woke neoliberal Left. To be sure, there are some figures who are trying to take that neoliberal Left and marry it to a kind of Occupy-style, class-based material Left—take Ro Khanna, the California congressman, who’s one of the most prominent backers of his state’s proposed billionaire tax. In the conservative mind, all this stuff gets sort of mixed together. But the Left’s tensions and factions are serious and ought to be understood by the Right.

The other piece is the MAGA position on all of this. What is the MAGA answer to either the abundance agenda on the one hand, or a Warren-style anti-corporatism and anti-free marketism on the other? Some parts of the MAGA coalition seem open to imposing constraints around capital and enterprise.

Rufo: What’s interesting is that, as you’re suggesting, the Left and the Right have factions that are, in some sense, mirror images of one another. There’s the socialistic Left that is leaning into almost Maoist ideas: seize the housing, seize the billionaires’ assets, and redistribute wealth for social programs. It’s the kind of rhetoric that you would hear in 1980s Mozambique or 1980s Central American leftist caudillo republics. The socialist Left cleans it up with polished marketing language once they get into office, but an underlying hardline edge remains.

The neoliberals, in contrast, advocate a technocratic, more Scandinavian-style socialistic policy that recognizes that capitalism is the generator of wealth; nevertheless, they want to have a sophisticated and technocratic method of harnessing capitalism’s power to redistribute its benefits in a market-efficient way.

The Right’s tensions mirror the Left’s in the sense that there’s the old free-market Right—championing supply-side economics, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan. But then there’s a MAGA faction that says, no, intervene to ensure that Blackstone doesn’t own any single-family homes, and put caps on credit card interest rates.

I’m somewhat sympathetic to the MAGA view, at least to a degree. I want family policies that incentivize family life and childrearing. Such economically interventionist policies would certainly differ from the old Reagan Right.

Obviously, there are quite a few ideas here. It’s a moment of flux, after all. So perhaps we can give a bit more of a historical genesis to the current moment. Many younger people don’t remember Occupy Wall Street. Some are sufficiently young that they don’t even remember Bernie Sanders’s moment in 2015 and 2016. Indeed, many younger viewers grew up on woke, AOC-style politics. So, if there is an economic turn—if we go from woke back towards leftist economics—what would that look like? What are the precursors? Where might it go?

Lomez: I agree that telling the story of the Left’s ongoing evolution does require going back to the early 2010s with the Occupy movement. Of course, one could go back even further, but Occupy constitutes a pretty clean starting point to understand how the Left graduated into wokeness and is now undergoing its evolution.

https://dianebederman.com/dear-world-we-are-not-the-holocaust-we-are-israel/

The time has come to stop putting an emphasis on Jewish death and instead celebrate LIFE.

It has been 81 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. When people imagine Auschwitz, they often picture a single camp. But Auschwitz was not one place, it was a vast complex. Auschwitz-Birkenau covered more than 40 square kilometers, about 15 square miles. It included more than 40 sub-camps, forced labor sites, rail lines, barracks, gas chambers, and crematoria. Birkenau alone was designed to hold more than 100,000 prisoners at a time. This wasn’t chaos. It was an industrialized system of murder. Understanding the scale matters, because genocide doesn’t happen in a moment. It is built, expanded, and normalized. The Nazis were not alone. They were aided and abetted by most of the world, including Britain and America, Canada and Pope Pius XII.

Today, though, it seems many are unaware of the Holocaust; or prefer to change the context. The number of British schools commemorating the Holocaust has plummeted by nearly 60 percent following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel.  Think about that. Jews murdered in their homes by barbaric Muslims invading during a ceasefire and the response to that is reducing information about the Holocaust!

In the past we often dealt with Holocaust denial. Not anymore. Now, thanks to DEI, CRT and Woke progressivism, we do not deny or demean the Holocaust, oh no. It is imperative, now, that we teach an “all-inclusive” mass extinction.  The National Education Association(the largest teachers’ union and professional employee organization in the United States) handbook contains a description of the Holocaust as having claimed the lives of “more than 12 million victims of different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.” (Ahhh, yes, the Nazis were looking for people calling themselves transgender and non-binary).

The “12 million” figure was calculated by combining the fatality numbers among various people who suffered in the war, but who were not targeted by the Nazis for mass annihilation. And, incredibly, the NEA did not even mention the actual victims of the genocide, the Jews. Of course not. Today, Jews are oppressors, not the oppressed or victims of genocide.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/stupidity-or-evil-which-is-more-dangerous/

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer’s insight remains one of the most unsettling diagnoses of moral collapse ever written—not because it flatters our intelligence, but because it strips away comforting illusions. Evil, he observed, can be confronted. It can be named, resisted, punished. Stupidity, by contrast, is immune to argument. Facts bounce off it. Evidence is dismissed as irrelevant. Moral reasoning fails not because it is weak, but because it is no longer being received.

Bonhoeffer did not mean stupidity as a lack of intelligence. He meant something far more dangerous: the voluntary surrender of independent judgment to an ideology, movement, or collective identity. The stupid person, in his formulation, is not incapable of thinking—but has stopped thinking. He no longer acts as an individual moral agent. He functions as an instrument.

That distinction matters now more than ever.

Across the United States, protests against federal immigration enforcement have escalated from demonstrations into intimidation campaigns—disrupting religious services, harassing officers, vandalizing property, and in some cases openly encouraging violence against federal agents enforcing the law. The justification is always the same: moral righteousness, historical analogy, emotional urgency. And yet the facts—legal authority, due process, crime statistics, constitutional limits—are waved away as beside the point.

This is Bonhoeffer’s stupidity at work.

One of the defining features of ideological stupidity is its joyfulness. Evil often appears dour and grim in our imagination, but in reality it frequently presents itself as exuberant, righteous, even celebratory. Once responsibility is dissolved into a collective—“the movement,” “the cause,” “history”—guilt evaporates. The individual no longer bears moral weight. He obeys. And obedience feels liberating.

That is why crowds can chant with glee while calling for harm. That is why activists can smile while threatening federal officers. That is why vandalism is rebranded as “resistance” and intimidation as “speech.” The participants do not experience themselves as committing wrongdoing. They experience themselves as morally elevated.

Bonhoeffer warned that once a person has been made stupid in this way, “every attempt to reason with him becomes senseless and dangerous.” Dangerous, because the challenge is no longer to an argument, but to an identity. When facts threaten the belief system, the system must be defended at all costs. Doubt becomes treason.

This explains a phenomenon many Americans now encounter daily: the refusal to engage with evidence. You can present crime data showing declining murder rates following enforcement actions. You can cite statutory authority granting federal agencies the power to remove those unlawfully present. You can point to court rulings affirming these powers. None of it matters. The response is not rebuttal, but moral outrage.