August 26, 2019

Ethnic composition of the anti-woke left

Here's a revealing insider observation of the antagonism that the woke left levels against various white ethnic groups who are supposedly their fellow travelers on the left:


Of course, the KKK would have exempted Southern whites, and yet the woke left hates their guts as well. Nowadays, Irish, Italians, etc., find themselves targeted alongside white Southerners, so the woke-ists cannot consist of some group that itself includes white Southerners, or who are welcoming to them at any rate.

An Appendix to this post goes over the ethnic backgrounds of particular members of the anti-woke left that I'm aware of, to substantiate the point made in the tweet above. What follows is a more general discussion. For now I'll just note that Aimee Terese, our post-prog princess, is half Lebanese (Catholic) and half white Australian (similar to the rowdy Celts of the American South).

* * * * *

Wokeness is an elite class ideology, so those ethnic groups most likely to play an elite role will wield it, while those who are less likely to belong to the elite are more likely to be its targets. And it deals primarily with matters of race, ethnicity, and national origin -- namely, which groups will be allowed representation within the elite (and how is this choice to be rationalized). It only secondarily deals with gender, sexual orientation, and so on.

The two major elite ethnic groups in the US are WASPs, the original one, and Ashkenazi Jews, who joined during the Great Compression.

White Anglo-Saxon Protestants refers to those primarily in the Northeast, though also where they settled in the Midwest and West Coast (especially northern California), and generally those who came from a Puritan religious background, upper-class social stratum, and who have formed the elite going back centuries -- not Scotch-Irish hillbillies in Appalachia.

Ashkenazi Jews are those from Central and Eastern Europe, who were adapted to a professional middleman minority niche for centuries, not the ones from the Mediterranean or the Near / Middle East.

As the American empire has expanded over the past several centuries, it has like all other empires relied on buying off a number of aspiring elites from various foreign ethnic groups that the empire comes to control. Some elites from outside the Italian peninsula were given precious Roman citizenship (like Paul the Apostle). The Ottoman Empire used the millet system. And the Iranian parliament has some seats reserved for the elites of several minority groups. These are the secondary elites allowed into the upper stratum by the primary elites.

The main group bought off by the primary elites are the African-Americans, via affirmative action to promote the "talented tenth" of their group into elite positions. More and more, though, this program supposedly intended to redress slavery has come to promote elite immigrants who recently arrived from Africa (like MSNBC anchor Joy Ann Reid, whose parents are from Ghana). Members of this group have a vested interest in wokeness, hoping that they will be one of the 10% of their group who are handpicked to join the elite.

The other major group being bought off and integrated into the elite are upper-caste South Asians, mainly Indians but some Pakistanis as well, and including Hindus as well as Muslims. They wrote the book on ethnically stratified class structures, so this is not only nothing new to them -- they will be more adept at navigating it than the WASPs or Jews in the primary elites. After decades or centuries, they may even join the Jews as a new primary elite group, though I still think they're too culturally different from Americans to be considered legitimate by them as primary elites. Wokeness is central to their carving out a similar class niche as they enjoyed back in South Asia, so they will be largely in favor of the ideology.

East Asians invented standardized testing for elite positions, and their Mandarins are eager to become a talented-tenth in the US as well. They're invested in wokeness to get this set-aside.

"Hispanics" are following the same strategy, although they don't have an existing caste system like India's to furnish the talented tenth, and they don't have the African-American legacy of slavery to demand immediate representation in the elite as redress. But the basic behavior is the same: those who are smarter and lighter-skinned than their groupmates will advance themselves as leaders of their people, destined to hold on to the handful of elite spots that are carved out for their group in the interest of incorporating their people into the empire. As with the other secondary elites, wokeness creates the set-asides for their aspiring representatives, so this group will not be motivated to put an end to woke capitalism and woke imperialism.

Rather, opposition to wokeness on the left is most likely to come from the ethnic groups who have already been assimilated into the American system -- and who therefore do not need to be bought off during the current round of expansion -- but who were not exotic and foreign enough in the old days to require being bought off with set-asides back then either. And, in contrast to the Ashkenazi Jews, do not have higher average IQ that makes them more inclined toward an elite niche.

These are the non-exotic, common-people ethnic groups. The founding stock who weren't Puritanical WASPy commercial elites, more concentrated in the South than the North. And the Ellis Island groups other than the Jews -- Irish, Italian, Polish, etc.

So although the backlash from within the left itself against wokeness is mainly a class issue, it correlates enough with ethnic background to make it a cultural issue as well. Evidently, both sides on the left are aware of this -- the woke side knowing that Italians are safe targets for derision as bad whites, and the Italians speaking out (or at least privately muttering) against the anti-Italian bias from the woke-ists.

This faultline within the left, and within the Democrat party, represents a fracture of the New Deal coalition, when these groups were not only united in purpose, but were the dominant party over the Republicans.

After neoliberalism broke down the proto-socialism of the New Deal era, improving the material welfare for all groups become replaced by equal representation of ethnic groups within the elite class -- and too bad if you're from a group that gets set-asides, but you're part of the 90% that didn't get chosen as the talented tenth. This benefits only the aspiring elites within an ethnic group, not that group as a whole. Yuppies win, the majority loses. And members of those groups without specific set-asides cannot rest assured of their chances to enter the elite, making them even more wary of the new system and its ideology.

As it happens, these same groups are the ones whose defection from the Democrats swung the 2016 election to Trump, the would-be realigner who promised radical changes to the neoliberal status quo, unlike Hillary Clinton. See this recent post with data from the General Social Survey on election behavior by white ethnic groups. Italians swung the most, then the Irish, with Germans, Scandinavians, and Slavs swinging to a lesser degree but still in Trump's direction.

WASPs and Jews actually voted less Republican than usual in 2016, revealing their pro-elite and anti-populist bias, compared to the other Ellis Islander groups and to commoner founding stock like the Scotch-Irish. The anti-woke groups swung toward Trump, the pro-woke groups swung away.

That is what flipped the cities and large counties, which is how Trump won (the reservoir of rural voters was long dried up). Some of them flipped entire states -- Poles flipped Wilkes-Barre, which helped flip Pennsylvania -- while others only flipped their blue urban area without flipping the entire state (Staten Island, or Suffolk County in Long Island).

These non-exotic, common-people ethnic groups are sick and fed up with the neoliberal order, since they don't even have the chance at getting into the elite through ethnic set-asides, and they don't already belong to the primary elites of WASPs and Jews. Other minority groups may be content with neoliberalism, as long as it opens up a little more of the elite to their set-aside group. But they don't need radical change for that.

This split was seen during the 2016 Democrat primary, where the old white ethnic groups loved Bernie, while the African-Americans and Hispanics were more in favor of Clinton. Staten Island and Suffolk County were Bernie's two best counties in the NYC metro area, while he got clobbered in those with more non-white populations (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, etc.).

And that split has not gone away -- during the 2020 season, it is alive in the woke vs. anti-woke battle within the left. Already a bunch of Bernie's support in Brooklyn has defected to Warren. Those are the WASPy, Jewish, upper-caste Indian, and other model minorities and talented-tenthers who helped to elect AOC. While they have turned their backs on Bernie for Warren, the Staten Islanders, further-away Long Islanders, and even the Bayridge long-timers in Brooklyn (right across from Staten Island), will be more likely to stick by Bernie -- assuming he does not fully surrender to wokeness during this cycle.

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Appendix

I've only been reading the anti-woke left Twitter people since last November, when this battle broke outside of the leftoid echo chamber. Most importantly, Angela Nagle writing a left case against open borders, an utter taboo for the woke-ists. I don't know who all of them are, but I've got a decent feel from the ones I read and who gets retweeted by those accounts.

A person can be anti-woke in various ways, and to varying degrees. But they have to have made some overt, regular commitment against woke-ism -- not just refraining from participating in woke pile-ons.

The anti-woke side is smaller on social media than the woke side, so just about all groups will be represented on the woke side. The question is, who is bold enough to go on the anti-woke side? How lopsided is some ethnic group in siding with the woke or the anti-woke side?

I'm just looking for what info is already available online (like does their Twitter account mention being Irish, although they might not say what other groups they belong to). It's not a 23andme test, so these results may not be the whole picture, but the basic impression is clear enough.

It's striking how many of the woke-ist attackers have Anglo, German, or Scandinavian surnames (Pritchard, Soeller, Schuetz, Jensen, etc.). And just about all the Jews on the left are woke-ists. The only exceptions are partial -- Jamie Kilstein is half Jewish, and so is Anna Khachiyan. In her case, it's more her Armenian father speaking out against the woketards, than her Jewish mother. I'm not sure about Kilstein's case, I've only heard him on one podcast with Unauthorized Disclosure, on the very topic of needing to put class and empire over identity politics.

The only major exception for Germans I'm aware of is Benjamin Studebaker of the What's Left podcast. That family is Protestant in origin, too, so even more of an exception.

Below is a list of groups, and Twitter names belonging to them. They're mostly the non-exotic, common-people groups, the electoral base of the New Deal Democrats. There are only two prominent ones who I don't know for sure. Amber Frost refuses to say, but she has said at least some degree of white Appalachian, and her non-European facial features look to me more African than Asian (which is what others tend to guess). And "foolinthelotus" is from a Christian Chicagoland family, which is likely white ethnic, though not necessarily.

I don't know if Zaid Jilani and basantyagi are flukes or representative of a coming trend, but it's intriguing that among South Asian leftists in the US, it's the Muslims who are present on the anti-woke side. Usually Muslims in the US are looking to get set-asides for their group, and play the odds of getting chosen into the top 10% of their group. Perhaps it's because the Muslim caste system is less stratified in South Asia compared to the Hindu one, making Hindu Brahmins even more inclined toward woke hierarchies.

Notice that white-passing or white-"adjacent" groups like the Lebanese and Armenians are willing to go against woke-ism. They can call themselves "brown," but they pass -- Mediterranean, maybe, but not "brown". Ralph Nader is a Lebanese Christian, and no one thought he was non-white (he also refused to go along with idpol during his campaign, sticking to economics and foreign policy). And "American Top 40" DJ, and voice of Shaggy from Scooby Doo, Casey Kasem was Lebanese Druze, and nobody thought he was non-white. Presumably if there were more Persians here, they would eventually side with the Rania Khalek / Anna Khachiyan / Zaid Jilani side, against wokeness.

White Southerners

htmlmencken
as_a_woman
martymacmarty
bog_beef
Maarblek

Irish

nickmullen
SeanMcCarthyCom
jmrphy
matthewaraven
Angela Nagle (not on Twitter)

Italian

GarbageApe
RacismFactory

Irish / Italian

mtracey
Shialabeefsteak (and German)

Irish / Polish

jimmy_dore

Italian / Polish

kylekulinski

Slavic Catholic

nobody_stop_me (Belarusian)
LizFranczak (Polish)
toms_spectre (Polish)
kgosztola (Hungarian)

Catholic, unknown ethnicity

BiomeBiota
HillaryFan420 (?)

Armenian / Ashkenazi

annakhachiyan

Lebanese

aimeeterese (Catholic)
RaniaKhalek (Druze)

Pakistani

Zaid Jilani

Indian Muslim

basantyagi

Unknown

Amber Frost (not on Twitter)
foolinthelotus

37 comments:

  1. hi how can we apply for a position on the list? thank you

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  2. first of all HUNGARIANS ARE NOT SLAVS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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    1. (cliff arroyo)
      The Hungarian language is not slav, but genetic research shows that most "Hungarians" are Magyarized Slavs and/or Germanics.
      Culturally, it's Central European with lingering eastern influence from the communist period.

      Delete
  3. measuring the lefts skulls in the name of wokeness

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  4. I'm not woke, genius. Voted Nader, Trump, soon Bernie. But I'm an Independent populist, economically left and culturally conservative.

    I only had the vaguest impression that there were a lot of Ellis Island ethnics in the anti-woke left -- it was Shialabeefsteak's post that crystallized it.

    I'm not cataloging this ethnic pattern in order to persecute the anti-woke left, but to reveal to anyone who's interested in building alliances, where the resistance to woke-ism is coming from. And explaining why some groups are all-in on wokeness, while others are not, even within the traditional Democrat / liberal voting blocs.

    See this related post on socialism as monotheism that will replace the polytheism of identity politics, on analogy with Christianity emerging out of the Roman imperial cult and polytheism that was used to hold together a multi-ethnic empire:

    http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2019/05/monotheistic-socialism-will-replace.html

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  5. Hungarian DNA is squarely within the Slavic cluster, even if they have adopted the non-Indo-European language of their one-time conquerors, the Magyars. They are historically Catholic like the other Western Slavs.

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  6. lol I'm not a boob man either, genius. That was the whole point -- how unusual it is for there to be so few ass men, or women with more ass than boobs, among political junkies.

    https://twitter.com/_curlytrill/status/1165983259475529728

    Body-wise, only haramgirlfriend and as_a_woman could post thirst traps to match my taste.

    Red Scare had a guest on once who was an ass girl, and more corporeal than cerebral -- weed_slut_420 (ig). But almost all of their audience hated that episode. That was one of my faves, without even knowing what she looked like at the time. The only time they touched on industrial policy -- "remember American Apparel, and how awesome it was to buy Made in USA clothing?"

    She's just not the personality / body type that the political junkie crowd is interested in.

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  7. Anti woke- hindus are more likely to rightists/ hindu nationalists/ trump supporter types than anti-woke leftists, that's probably part of the equation. Much like anti-woke Scots Irish and English people in the South, appalachia, midwest, and mountain west are much more likely to be rightist trump voters than anti-woke leftists.

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  8. Social media-tards are confusing "race science" with social construction of ethnicity, its opposite concept.

    None of this post treats the ethnic groups as having essential qualities that incline them toward wokeness or anti-woke-ness. Just the opposite: that based on their contingent history of integration within the American imperial system, some are primary elites, and others are secondary elites chosen for the purpose of maintaining order within a multi-ethnic system.

    And others have been left out of this ethnic elite protection system -- those who historically came through Ellis Island, or who were British but not part of the WASPy commercial elite from the Northeast and its offshoots westward (i.e. white Southerners).

    Liberals with ADD react to any discussion of ethnic groups as though it's an essentialist argument, even when it is explicitly an argument of historical contingency and dynamic construction of which groups form alliances with each other, and how that can change over time for reasons of competition over material resources (in this case, having a protected representation spot at the elite American imperial table).

    I didn't think social media could make people even dumber at reading comprehension, but there you go.

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    1. Even so, the class relations within(yes, within, not between) those ethnic categories matter a lot more as far as competition over material resources is concerned. Obsessing over ethnic groups, nations, and other things that are nowhere near as materially relevant to people's lives as class relations will only protect the ruling elite. Maybe that's what you want. If it isn't, stop obsessing over irrelevant bullshit like whether or not the Jews ruined the Lower East Side's food scene. This stuff is a waste of time.

      Delete
    2. I've never seen so many reactions to your stuff in the wild before! Agnostic, be gentle, it seemed to me that you, we here, are martians to them!
      I did get scared for a moment that they might unearth recent stuff of mine, even E. Breuning had commented about you, but I think this site is so outside for them that they won't stick around.

      Delete
  9. If libs were merely mischaracterizing a single post, big deal. But this reflex of theirs is part of a broader underlying syndrome whose practical repercussions are going to keep this society from building coalitions to realign itself out of crushing neoliberalism.

    The syndrome is both conceptual -- treating all arguments involving ethnicity as essentialist, social Darwinist, eugenicist, etc. -- and behavioral -- avoiding any efforts to build alliances with this or that ethnic or cultural group, if that would be problematic in their conceptual model.

    So, they aren't planning on organizing Italians in Staten Island, or Irish in Suffolk County LI. Those guys chose Bernie over Clinton in the primary, but Trump over Clinton in the general. They have zero stickiness in the liberal / Democrat coalition, so NYC leftists ought to be redoubling their efforts to keep those people on board with the Bernie movement.

    Nope: can't notice that certain ethnic groups -- for whatever historically contingent reasons -- continue to favor system disrupters like Bernie and Trump, not being loyal to either major party, while other groups favor the top-down Democrat machine model that will never give them Bernie, but only Clinton or Warren.

    Joke's on the leftoids, though: right-wingers have no conceptual or behavioral problem with looking at ethnic / cultural groups and doing outreach to them as groups, overtly or implicitly. They may even make historical contingent arguments, rather than racial essentialist ones -- locking in the Cuban vote in Florida by appealing to what historically motivated those Hispanics to come to America (elites fleeing a socialist revolution), not by appealing to their white skin color.

    Trump's campaign already took notice of these patterns, and decimated Crooked Hillary's political machine approach of taking the Ellis Islanders for granted. If the left cannot match that, they deserve to lose.

    I couldn't care less what social media libs think about some blog -- it's what such a reflex reveals about their underlying tendencies, and how those broad general tendencies are going to prevent successful realignment out of neoliberalism.

    They couldn't build a coalition to put up a stop light at a busy intersection -- and we're supposed to have hope of universal healthcare and withdrawing our imperial forces around the world? Jesus Christ.

    The lulz-iest aspect to all this is that it all began with a post from Shialabeefsteak -- a member of the online anti-woke left itself -- and like-minded people replying. I just expanded the level of detail, provided the historical explanation, and noted the practical implications -- losing Staten Island, Suffolk County, Wilkes-Barre, Kenosha, etc. to Trump, for good if the leftoids keep up their ignorance.

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    1. Ag, you've touched on the topic of these online political groups before, so I'll tell again what I saw mobilizing some of them in the past.
      The elites, Left and Right, get along great with each other and are pretty open about it. Republican Never Trumper Rick Wilson, Evan McMuffin, etc. could be chummy with WaPo journos and nobody batted an eye.
      The populists? So insecure and insular! And if and when a Lefty populist starts cavorting with similar on the Right, guess who's there to make him a pariah? McMuffin and co.'s liberal friends. Broad coalition for me, but not for thee. And few noticed! These guys would take these criticisms to heart not noticing the hypocrisy!
      It was at its worst in 2016-2017, but it's definitely still strong. Scared lefties? Yep, they're a thing, too.

      I also think Twitter is a uniquely reactive and narcissistic medium. It's at its best when exploited by an infrequent or non-user.

      Delete
  10. I clicked on the one you called "genius". Yeah, he's completely ridiculous. Most of whom I saw seemed bemused.

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  11. "class relations within (yes, within, not between) those ethnic categories matter a lot more as far as competition over material resources is concerned"

    That's true for an individual's list of priorities that they want politicians to address.

    But all politics is coalitional. It's right there in the NYC data on who voted for whom in the 2016 Dem primary:

    https://www.gothamgazette.com/6308-takeaways-from-new-york-presidential-

    Even controlling for class, the white ethnics were more favorable toward Bernie -- and then Trump -- whereas the protected minorities (or those aspiring to such, like recent upper-caste Indians) were more lukewarm toward Bernie, and now are preferring Warren over Bernie.

    And of course, the poorest and least-white districts in New York turned out for Clinton in the primary, since that's their role in top-down machine politics.

    You may wish that there weren't an ethnically organized system of patronage, but there is -- anyone looking to improve the system has to grapple with that. The neolib Establishment already is -- they're doing away with Ellis Islanders as protected minorities, taking them for granted, and reaching out to new waves of immigrants as aspiring protected elites.

    That radically changes how eager the old Ellis Island groups will be to put skin in the game for Bernie or other lefty realigners. They were fine with Bernie, but already defected to Trump in the general against the Dem machine candidate.

    And it changes how eager the new minorities will be to pursue anti-Establishment realignment. They're already protected (Af-Ams) or are already busy trying to carve out their own niche within the elites (upper-caste Indians, Hispanics, etc.). Those who are protected by the system will be more resistant to a radical change to it -- and like it or not, the system protects them at the level of groups (a seat reserved for the Af-Ams, a seat reserved for the Brahmins, etc.).

    If you just look at individuals, you'll cast a wide net that isn't going to scoop up as much as you think. You have to find out who is willing, even eager, to join your coalition -- and be aware of where you're likely to find an icy reception.

    That's why you have to know about Italians in Staten Island, Irish and Italians in Suffolk County, Poles in Wilkes-Barre, and so on. Otherwise you don't know where the crucial pressure-points are, and will spend too much time preaching to the converted -- or worse, to places that are solid locks for the Dem machine.

    I'm not saying you have to have an overtly ethnic pride appeal to Italians in Staten Island. But you do have to be aware of who they are, what they want, what their history is for Establishment vs. realigners is, where their group fits in within the group-oriented hierarchy (again, whether or not you like the hierarchy having carve-outs for groups rather than individuals).

    If you target two neighborhoods of equal class, one in Staten Island and one in non-white areas of Queens, only one is going to be easy going for Bernie realigners -- SI. That doesn't mean you're thinking less of the black/brown Dem machine voters as people, or that you're going to cut them off from universal programs once you get Bernie through the primary and the White House by calling on the Italian SI cavalry.

    I mean, you're not going to cut off right-wing Dutch farmers in Texas from universal healthcare, despite their not voting for Bernie in either the primary or general. But it would be silly to target that group for organizing a coalition to get an anti-idpol materialist like Bernie to triumph over Clinton, Warren, Biden, and the rest.

    Categorizing people into groups does not lead to material racial exclusion, let alone genocide.

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  12. And just about all the Jews on the left are woke-ists.

    (Greenwald? Aaron Mate?)

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  13. As the only anti-woke entirely of Ashkenazi extraction, this makes sense to me.

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  14. I'm not sure about Kilstein's case, I've only heard him on one podcast with Unauthorized Disclosure, on the very topic of needing to put class and empire over identity politics.

    (Not even remotely leftist, a fanatical pro-Bush neoconservative in the vein of Michelle Malkin.)

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  15. Longer-term, sure, the goal is to transcend ethnicity and do only class, as I've detailed before comparing socialism (actual, not SJW-ism) to Christianity, destined to overcome the identity politics and imperial cult of the Roman Empire or the American Empire:

    http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2019/05/monotheistic-socialism-will-replace.html

    But here and now, you have to be aware of where you're going to maximize the return on your effort -- just as with Christianity, which did not find equal acceptance among all demographic groups. It was popular with Gentiles rather than Jews, Roman subjects rather than those of other empires (Persia, India, or the Northeastern part of Europe), urban rather than rural, and so on and so forth.

    Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, did not waste time trying to convert Jews after he figured out that they were more interested in the Jesus movement as a thing for Jews only (exemplified by Peter and James, who organized in Jerusalem). And he didn't wander the countryside, but set up shop in urban places. Nor did he wander over the Rhine River, into Mesopotamia, etc.

    In the steady state, most people will be part of the system, but in the transitory state it's going to take one set of paths rather than another set -- through these groups, and not those other groups.

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  16. Personally I think you're forcing people into categories to confirm conclusions you've already decided on instead of looking at the facts and letting them speak for themselves.

    Some of the most fanatical "woke" leftists like Amanda Marcotte (white southerner) or Jessica Valenti (Italian) fit into your anti-woke ethnicities. Some Jews (Greenwald) fit into your "woke" elites.

    I also think your categories are wildly out of date. You're basically rehashing 1970s Michael Novak/Barbara Mikulski "white ethnic" essentialism without realizing that it was part of the right wing backlash that was the basis for Clintonism and the DLC.

    Also, who exactly fits cleanly into the "WASP" or "Ellis Island" category anymore? My parents were mixed WASPs/Polish and I'm pretty sure that was pretty much the norm.

    What might be interesting is how Puritanism was transformed into the ethos of the PMC. But I think you've gotten way too entangled in ethnic categories to see the forest through the trees.

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  17. By the way, @basantyagi is not Muslim. So that aspect of the hypothesis isn’t supported.

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  18. I thought about Greenwald and Mate, but the criteria were making regular and overt statements against woke-ism. They're anti-Russiagate, supportive of Red Scare, and perhaps privately they're against identity politics and treating Trump and Tucker as Nazi white nationalists posing an existential threat.

    I'm looking at those who are openly and regularly against woke BS. That doesn't mean everyone outside of this sample is a woketard. Either I don't know who they are, or they're only tacitly anti-woke.

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  19. This misstates the claim here: "Some of the most fanatical "woke" leftists like Amanda Marcotte (white southerner) or Jessica Valenti (Italian) fit into your anti-woke ethnicities."

    It's not about some here or some there. But which groups are more likely -- not 100%, not 0% -- to produce anti-woke figures.

    The post already says that just about all groups are represented in the woketard camp (McElwee et al). That's not interesting, because it's not presence or absence -- but more represented, less represented. Even if it's only a minority of some group that are anti-woke, is it 30% or 0.3%?

    There are lots of WASPs in the woke camp -- and virtually none willing to go against that. There are some Irish in the woke camp, like McElwee, but there are also a shitload who are hostile to woke-ism. That's a major difference between WASPs and Irish (or Italians, Lebanese, etc.).

    Again, I'm not slotting anyone into anything -- Shialabeefsteak, and several of his commenters, brought this out into the open. They stated how hostile the woke left is to Irish, Italians, and Catholics. OK, let's see if that's true or not -- after looking into it, yes, that's true. Why? The explanation is mine, as are the practical implications discussed.

    It must be an open secret within the social media left itself, if it can be discussed like that by its own members, outside of DMs and group chats.

    My categories cannot be out of date if they're striking such a chord -- otherwise the reaction would be, "what's an Italian-American? we're all white / American / human / etc.". The argument is not essentialist if it repeatedly refers to Ellis Island and the Dem machine of ethnic patronage that sprung up at the time -- and the re-orientation of that machine of patronage away from those old ethnics (who are taken for granted), and toward newer ethnics.

    Something is either true or not -- it has nothing to do with who uses it as a "talking point," a dum-dum guilt-by-association objection. And as has been pointed out, right-wingers are fine with noticing and acting on these group differences -- if the ignorant left wants to continue being clueless and powerless, that's their problem.

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  20. There are lots of WASPs in the woke camp -- and virtually none willing to go against that.

    (Have you seen the video of Derrick Jensen drawing connections between queer studies and pedophilia? In any event, you're kind of doing a no true Scotsman fallacy here by excluding "Southern Whites." The South is by far the most WASP part of the country. Eliminating "southern whites" from the WASP category is stacking the deck. How many pure New England WASPs are even left these days?)

    "They stated how hostile the woke left is to Irish, Italians, and Catholics."

    (The woke left loves Andrew Cuomo, whom they supported over the WASP Cynthia Nixon. They also HATE Bernie with the heat of 1000 suns. My guess is there's a far more virulent strain of anti-semitism on the woke left than anti-Catholicism.)

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  21. The post already says that just about all groups are represented in the woketard camp (McElwee et al). That's not interesting, because it's not presence or absence -- but more represented, less represented. Even if it's only a minority of some group that are anti-woke, is it 30% or 0.3%?

    (Wokeism/Neoliberalism/Shitlibism I think if you really trace it back to its roots is opportunistic Democratic machine politicians cynically using the front loaded Southern primaries to hold off attacks to their own power. The "vote like black women" crowd are mostly Irish/Italian machine politicians coming out of the DLC and the reaction against McGovern. That's why the Southern primaries are so important but originally "Super Tuesday" was designed to limit the power of blacks and the antiwar movement. That's what actually gave us Joe Biden and the Clintons.)

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  22. On the Puritan origin of wokeness, here's a summary, since it's really a topic for another full post.

    Wokeness is not unique to 21st-century America -- it's a variation on a timeless and placeless theme. The British Empire had something similar during their imperial heyday (Victorian: stiff upper lip, and White Man's Burden), as did the Roman Empire at their height (2nd C. AD: Stoicism, and polytheistic tolerance + imperial cult).

    The function is social control -- to keep the commoners from getting too unruly, and to legitimate the elites. Isn't that needed for any society? Somewhat -- but especially so for a sprawling multi-ethnic empire whose leaders have soaring levels of wealth and power compared to the commoners.

    There are two aspects:

    1) Restraining libidinal desires for both the commoners (moral panics targeting urges of common folk), and the elites (self-denial, stiff upper lip, etc.). This keeps the mass of people from getting to rowdy and unruly to be governed by the elites. And it also legitimates the elites as being dispassionate altruistic stewards rather than greedy parasites.

    2) Promoting harmony among varying groups in a multi-ethnic empire. This means buying off elites from peripheral groups who normally wouldn't be influenced by the imperial core, if it weren't an empire. It's both material funneling of resources to such secondary elites, as well as cultural / symbolic like honoring their regional gods (polytheism) -- provided that everyone upholds the imperial cult religion. Without this buy-off, newcomer groups would chafe at being ruled by foreigners, and be a constant thorn in the side of the imperial core.

    Puritans in America were just the initial material elites -- representing the mercantile and financial sectors of society, not the agricultural sector or the military sector (Southern slaveowners and martial elites, who lost the material and cultural war against the mercantile / financial Yankees).

    The particular American form of wokeness is just a local version of the British imperial and Roman imperial ideology -- Stoicism and buying off exotic elites, to promote domestic social control and imperial integration.

    I reject the idealist / culturalist view that emphasizes the Puritans' control of the press and the academy (for a time, since overtaken by the other primary elite, Ashkenazi Jews). Control over cultural institutions stems from their material standing as the mercantile and financial elites, and their leading an empire toward integrating more and more exotic groups. The military may have conquered those groups in war, but the mercantile sector has to integrate them afterward, in peacetime, to keep the economic and political system well-oiled and harmonious.

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  23. "My categories cannot be out of date if they're striking such a chord"

    The neoliberal/Clintonite wing of the Democratic Party has been exploiting them for decades. Take Barbara Mikulski.

    [T]he ethnic American also feels unappreciated for the contribution he makes to society. He resents the way the working class is looked down upon. In many instances he is treated like the machine he operates or the pencil he pushes. He is tired of being treated like an object of production. The public and private institutions have made him frustrated by their lack of response to his needs. At present he feels powerless in his daily dealings with and efforts to change them. Unfortunately, because of old prejudices and new fears, anger is generated against other minority groups rather than those who have power. What is needed is an alliance of white and black, white collar, blue collar and no collar based on mutual need, interdependence and respect, an alliance to develop the strategy for new kinds of community organization and political participation.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Mikulski#Early_political_career

    What actually WOULD be interesting is someone explaining how the Clintons turned on a dime in 2016 and suddenly became (at least symbolically) pro-black, especially after running a racist campaign against Obama in 2008, and got away with it.

    How did Miss Kitchen Table Blue collar pro-ethnic Hillary of 2008 become the ultra woke Hillary of 2016?

    The neoliberal Democratic elites are kind of having it both ways. They're promoting identity politics even while they're crying out against them.

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  24. Come for the ethnic list, stay for the material analysis of Puritan wokeness.

    So far, looks like only Anna K. read the post all the way through, giving a good-faith response on Twitter (RT'ed by princess Aimee).

    And who says these art hoes ain't loyal?

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  25. I think what Anna points out is an interesting aspect of your post. Puritanical protestant cultural reaction recurs in ever-changing forms. My problem is simply that you attribute great power and stability to ethnic/religious/racial identities. This analysis is at odds with the anti-idpol position. I find idpol to be an elite phenomena, period. As such, the main correlates to idpol-adherence are probably education and wealth.

    There is also mystic sociological reasoning. For example, regarding Indians: just because they come from a society with an intricate and unequal system of social stratification doesn't mean they would be particularly good at "gaming" the American one. In so far as they're able to, it reveals tangible material advantages had by middle class immigrants. I don't see how being born in an "unchanging" caste system would prime one to be able to rise easily in a capitalist American class system. And if so, how such a trait would pass on beyond the first generation.

    I'm not sure if personal anecdotes are useful, but I shed my vestiges of wokeness for two conscious reasons. 1) I became more overtly interested in socialism, but upon examining the identitarian and post-modern gunk passing as the current left, quickly grew disillusioned. I found it inherently incompatible with the core of socialist politics. 2) I didn't have the mental resilience required to continue credulously performing all the BS obeisances required to be "woke". Probably because I'm stagnant in life there was no use either, since all the virtue signalling is eminently practical.

    And so everything returns to material conditions...

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  26. Treating Southerners as WASPs is genetic determinism, which I reject. The post is about ethnicity -- just being a literal white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant does not make one a WASP.

    The term refers only to those from the Northeast and its off-shoots out West -- they're a different ethnic group from white Southerners, because continental race according to DNA is not ethnicity. They come from a different geographical region, speak with a different language / dialect, follow different religious traditions, practice radically different kinship norms (no clan feuds in Yankeedom), and derive their subsistence from different material modes -- mercantile and financial, rather than plantation agriculture or the military.

    You know an easy way to tell if two groups are really the same ethnic group? Ask them both -- are you guys part of the same ethnic group? Yankees and Southerners treat each other like they come from different planets, and because ethnicity is socially constructed (both defined from within by the in-group, as well as who treats you as non-members of some out-group), that's all that matters.

    WASPs are those who have been the national-level elite since the founding of the nation (later joined by Jews). Do Southern whites strike you as the leaders of American culture, especially its elite institutions? Keep your eye on the ball here.

    Notice that there's no version of the word "race" in here. That's something that only the leftoids are inserting -- race science, measuring skulls, etc. (no discussion of such, aside from having to guess about Amber because she doesn't say who her people are, unlike the others who do).

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  27. Ethnicity is pretty stable, but I'm discussing political coalition membership. The Irish in America still refer to themselves as "the Irish," not so much "Irish-Americans" etc. They know who they are, and the other groups know who the Irish are. That is stable.

    But what is not stable is their allegiance to either of the two major political parties, or what kind of agenda they want their usual party (Democrats) to pursue. When they were the recent arrivals at Ellis Island, they went right into the Democrat machine and stayed that way for awhile.

    But as they assimilated, they did not stand out as new immigrants anymore. We had closed borders during the New Deal, but around the mid-1970s the floodgates were opened again (part of the transition from the New Deal to neoliberalism, to cut costs for labor-intensive sectors by importing cheap labor).

    Suddenly, these new immigrant groups are the exotic ones who need to be bought off with reserved seats at the political table, or else their groups will not become well integrated into the American empire. So the Democrats took the Irish, Italian, Polish, etc., votes for granted, and moved on to courting the elites from Hispanic, African immigrant, South Asian, East Asian, etc. backgrounds.

    The Democrats kept the reserved seat for African-Americans since they felt it would be too risky to take them for granted and alienate them. They're more exotic to the American system than Irish or Italians.

    Now you have a situation where the old Ellis Islanders -- minus the Jews, who have since joined the WASPs in the primary elite stratum -- have little material motive to pursue woke politics, while the aspiring elites of new immigrant groups and among the old Af-Ams have every reason to pursue that.

    If the old Ellis Island groups do not have guaranteed spots in the elite set aside for them, justified on the grounds of wokeness and diverse representation, then they have a lot *less* to lose by toppling the tower of wokeness.

    That's the only way to explain the NYC Dem primary from 2016. Ellis Islanders from Staten Island and Bayridge had nothing to gain from Clinton, since Italians aren't given set-asides for their talented tenth. So they went with Bernie, who promised universal programs and redistributing wealth toward everyone at the middle and lower income level. As opposed to the working-class black/brown areas in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, who voted for the candidate that would continue to set aside elite spots for their ethnic groups -- Crooked Hillary.

    Again, you don't have to denigrate those Dem machine voters. Nobody is ever going to win an election -- primary or general -- with 100% of the vote. If some group is intractable, get as much as you can from them, but don't rely on them, and don't keep wasting your time there when it's clear you can't squeeze any more blood from that stone. Find a group who is more amenable to your message, and rack up your gains there.

    If the programs are universal, then it doesn't matter that working-class brown people in central Queens didn't vote for Bernie -- they'll still get the same goodies as those who did vote for him in Staten Island and Suffolk County.

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  28. Genes and cultural customs are pretty stable for several generations after the first wave of immigrants. Perhaps not so much the customs that have little material pay-off -- religion usually declines into secularism / no religion, since there is little material benefit to practicing Hinduism in a non-Hindu country, or Islam outside of a Muslim country, etc.

    But the cultural customs that do raise the material prospects of an individual and their extended family -- oh, you bet those customs are going to stay firmly entrenched. The cram school practices of East Asian Mandarins, or upper-caste South Asians. Parents not allowing you to marry outside your class / caste. Parents not allowing you to pursue a career outside of the professional goals of your parents. And so on and so forth.

    The customs associated with the caste system help the people navigate an ethnically stratified class hierarchy, so those too will stay strong among South Asian immigrants. That will give them more of an advantage at benefiting from the woke system, compared to immigrants -- even wealthy ones -- from a culture without a caste system.

    There's something going on there, since upper-caste South Asians make up a very small percent of the North-Am population, but are heavily represented in the woke left -- Waleed Shahid, Saikat Chakrabarti, Saira Rao, Jeet Heer, even Bhaskar Sunkara (more of a flip-flopping socialist, who props up Liz Warren). And those are only the big names, not to mention Twitter "influencers" with modest profiles.

    The only exception I can think of is Zaid Jilani, and he's Pakistani. I know he's not a socialist, but he is on the left rather than the right, and he is anti-woke rather than woke. And there's you among the Indians, but the Dems wouldn't let you run the campaign of the next AOC, since you'd try to make the person more like Bernie rather than more like Liz Warren.

    Maybe the divide is Pakistani vs. Indian -- hard to tell, since there's only Jilani to point to.

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  29. Vivek Chibber is the only well known upper-caste Indian leftist who's staunchly against woke-ism, considering it a heresy against Marxism. But he's like Adolph Reed among African-Americans -- well known, but not part of a broader network of fellow travelers from his own ethnic background. Most of their fans are from other ethnic groups -- if I had to guess, probably white Southerners and Ellis Islanders!

    Sadly, most Indian and Af-Am leftists in the US are deeply committed to wokeness.

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  30. Last thoughts for now: even the anti-woke left is still gripped by Nazi panic, albeit not as badly as the woke left. They may not think Tucker, a mainstream media figure, could transform America into Nazi Germany, as the woketards believe. And they may see ploys by the neolib Establishment to cast contemporary affairs in terms of 1930s Germany as the empty distraction that they are -- where the only solution is to vote back in the pre-Nazi guys like Biden and Warren.

    And yet all it took was a post on their ethnic backgrounds to send the anti-woke left into a panic, on the whole. For some the reflex was "Holy shit, someone's made a list of ethnic groups to exterminate!" If they took two seconds to skim the post, they can tell it's a positive list, not a negative one. But still the reflex, "Holy shit, I may be on this safe list, but that means all other groups not listed are slated for extermination!" Either way, it's a Nazi list drawn up for eugenic purposes.

    For others, the reflex was more conceptual than practical: "Holy shit, can you believe some people still believe in race science and skull measurements? I thought that died out with the Nazis, but guess not!" No mention of race or DNA or physical traits in the post, only discussions of historically constructed ethnicities, but there's no such thing in the liberal mind anymore.

    All traits ascribed to ethnic groups are taken to be claims about essential qualities at the microbiological level, not the outcome of social / cultural / historical processes. The claim may *seem* like a sociological one -- but that's just a disguise for their eugenic motives that are truly, secretly based on DNA, race, physiognomy, etc. Nobody talks about ethnic differences who isn't a crypto- or overt Nazi.

    Odd as it may appear, the anti-idpol crowd has thoroughly essentialized ethnicity. "Don't talk about group identities" is not a materialist strategic move to focus on class first, but an idealist commandment not to open Pandora's box of dangerous taboo ideas -- which includes any discussion of ethnic differences.

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  31. The funniest part is how marginal "the list" is -- it's just an appendix, the dry technical part relegated to the end, where the writer expects most people won't care about reading it.

    The main body of the text is not about the individuals on the list -- no one cares about them per se, they're just there to substantiate a claim. It's the broader discussion of how ethnicity and class interact in the kind of political / economic system we have, with a prelude from the anti-woke left itself making the main empirical claim for me, though not proposing an explanation.

    The screengrabbers were careful to remove the prelude from an anti-woke left source, as well as the entire body of the argument, leaving just the title and appendix. "Here's the name of some list -- who's in, who's out?" Submoronic clickbait for Millennials. Only Anna K, ever going against the grain, bothered reading the body and responding to the main argument.

    Social media cannot promote thinking, its sole function is to keep depressive ADD brains hooked up to a constant flow of hot take stimuli, to provoke enough emotional reflexes to comfort the reader in knowing they're still physically alive, and delay suicide another day. A "hellsite" indeed.

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    Replies
    1. Just discovered these two women earlier, and they seem to represent the very best in the political world, Kristina and Celia of the Whistleblower Newsroom:
      https://youtu.be/pZsho-RW_HQ

      It's one of the best things I've come across in the political world. I've heard Ed Butowsky interviewed on a handful of internet and radio broadcasts discussing his role in Russiagate and all have been good, especially Consortium News, but these women were especially empathetic and perceptive.

      It'll restore anyone's faith.

      Delete
  32. damn, things have changed a lot since this list of anti-woke leftists was compiled. Kyle Kulinski went full libtard, Aimee Terese went full conservative culture warrior, and Justin Murphy became an Urbit shill.

    ReplyDelete

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