The Unbearable Lightness Of Woke

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ntil the peevish, thin-skinned, self-selected cultural hall monitors took over the national culture, I never dreamed that such preposterous, invented affronts could be taken seriously enough to be sanctioned as “hate speech” against politically selected “victims,” and subjected to censorship, abuse, and harassment.

What we used to call “political correctness” ––a phrase which originated in the 1930’s frequently used to compliment fanatic adherents of totalitarian regimes––as damaging as it was, pales next to the sheer stupidity, toxic hyperbole, and preposterous big lies that have flourished during the Trump decade brought about by the Left’s ongoing political meltdown. Their complaints and attacks with obsessive ad Hitlerum fallacies are nothing but man-bites-dog stories, and usually are just traffic noise for normal grown-ups.

However, recently, the “woke” Stasi have outdone themselves with their attacks on actress and model Sydney Sweeney’s advertisement for American Eagle’s new line of jeans. In one video, Sweeney changed an American Eagle billboard featuring her tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” by crossing out the word “genes” and replacing it with “jeans.”

Passionate progressive intensity ensued; with some haters calling the ad “a dog whistle for eugenics.” Things got even worse when Sweeney commented, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color.” This obvious truth really riled up the permanently offended race-hacks, who whipped out their ideological binoculars and took off virtue signaling. They insisted Sweeney’s comments and visuals were actually all about “eugenics” and “white supremacism,” along with giving a nod to other Nazism crackpot racial theories.

This juvenile tantrum reveals the “woke’s” trademark ignorance of history. Francis Galton (1822-1911), Darwin’s cousin who invented the term eugenics, applied Darwin’s theory of “fitness for survival” to the mind, morals, and character of human beings. Galton, Robert Zubrin points out, saw human nature “almost as plastic as clay under the control of the breeder’s will,” and said the “unfit” must be kept from procreating; for “if these continued,” Galton warned, “to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.”

Eugenics, then, was an extension of Darwin’s idea that evolution gives only some people the “survival as the fittest,” while the others, the unfit, should be forbidden from procreating.

Presented as a “science” rather than a hypothesis, and supporting Jim Crow laws, eugenics didn’t take long to become a powerful political idea. New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson said “sterilization or racial disaster,” and Teddy Roosevelt warned of “race suicide” if eugenics was not practiced. But eugenics also permeated the popular culture, magazines, and books. In 1902, Stanford president David Starr Jordan published The Blood of a Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races by the Survival of the Unfit. In 1920, Lothrop Stoddard wrote The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy, and Madison Grant, in 1916, The Passing of the Great Race. All were best-sellers. Adolf Hitler called Grant’s book his “Bible” and sent him a letter.

More despicable, in 1927, the Supreme Court’s decision Buck vs. Bell legalized forced sterilizations, which Oliver Wendell Holmes rationalized by quipping, “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” The idea that some humans inherited traits that made them fit to survive, while others were unfit and destined for extermination, were embraced by the educated in our best universities, as well as Progressive technocrats who considered those ideas to be what we have come to call “settled science.”

Others who rejected those ideas were slandered as dangerously ignorant, sentimental, naïve humanitarians, and Christians––all “deniers” of science who believed in superstitions, and the unscientific belief that all humans are inherently valuable and bestowed with unalienable rights and freedom. Sound familiar? As Darwin warned, “The weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”

Eugenics, moreover, was studied by the Nazis who created corresponding race-policies; having learned much from Americans race “scientists.” That research contributed to the Nazi “final solution” for eliminating the Jews. As Hitler during a dinner said, “We are a member of creation and children of nature, and the same laws are valid for us as for all living organisms. And in nature the law of struggle reigns from the beginning. Everything that is incapable of life and everything weak is eradicated. Only humans, and especially the church, have made it their goal to artificially preserve the weak, the unfit for life, and the inferior.”

Many scientists and politicians in the U.S. agreed that what the Nazis called “life unworthy of life” should not be allowed to reproduce, and unfit women should be forced to be sterilized. Allowing the unfit to have children was a threat to the nation’s interests and security, one so dangerous that it would cause “race suicide.” Eugenics––an inhuman, unconstitutional, and unscientific crackpot idea––was made the reason & rationale for forced sterilization. Yet this violation of Constitutional rights was still taught, researched, and promoted by our most prestigious universities, and endorsed by other cognitive elites who boasted that they “follow the science.”

By the way, Darwin’s “scientific racism” also provided an argument for colonialism: “At some future period . . . the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” And, like most fans of Darwin and eugenics, Darwin was a racist. For example, in The Descent of Man (1871), Robert Zubrin writes, “Darwin said that the Negro and the European were of such ‘distinct’ races that a naturalist might consider them two different ‘species,’ and that the evolutionary break between animals and man was between the ‘Negro’ and the ‘gorilla.’”

Finally, the eugenics that “woke” critics of Sidney Sweeney accuse her of endorsing, was the project of Progressives who believed that technocrats and scientists in federal agencies should replace Judeo-Christian morality and the Constitution’s unalienable rights, and divided powers that give citizens the responsibility to choose policies with their votes.

The Progressives who gave us eugenics are still producing policies and laws which violate our rights and damage our culture & economy. Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming, the claim that human carbon emissions will destroy the planet, professes that “settled science” supports this idea; and those who challenge the science are “deniers” ––just like believers of eugenics fancied itself as a proven “science,” and disbelievers were ignorant or unscientific, superstitious rubes.

The warmists also have damaged people’s lives in underdeveloped countries which don’t have a natural abundance of the cheap petrochemical resources which created the rich and powerful West, Hence, the warmists’ dubious and expensive promotion of “Net-Zero Carbon;” multiple billions of taxpayer dollars spent on subsidies for intermittent solar and windmill energy; and economies damaged by expensive “green energy” policies and unpopular EV’s. The “woke” who assaulted an actress advertising blue jeans have no problem believing in some of history’s silliest bad ideas.

However, the Trump Administration, which is engaging battle with this climate scientism, has released “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel column about the Review provides a useful catalogue of global warming’s dubious “settled science:”

“Global warming has risks, but also benefits, including greater agricultural productivity. We still don’t know the extent to which human activity plays a role in warming, given natural variability, data limitations, uncertain models and fluctuations in solar activity. Models predicting what is to come remain all over the map. U.S. historical data doesn’t support claims of increased frequency or intensity of extreme weather. Climate change is likely to have little effect on economic growth. U.S. climate policies, even drastic ones, will have negligible effect on global temperatures.”

The “Woke” Democrat juvenile attacks on those who don’t take them seriously have been steadily losing traction for months. Hopefully they will figure out that the 100 years of the progressive attack on the Constitution with sketchy scientism just might have already passed its sell-by-date. ✪