Rights versus responsibilities

Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He got into trouble with the Canadian thought police and now is speaking out fearlessly. He urges conservatives to speak the truth as they have come to know it.

Peterson is against postmodernism. He recommends we read a book by Stephen Hicks entitled Explaining Postmodernism. Postmodernists are not grateful. They are resentful, arrogant, and deceitful. They are opposed to the individual, logic, and dialogue. They slot themselves into victim vs. oppressor categories. The Left sells millennials rights. The Right sells responsibilities.

Peterson encourages us to not be afraid speak our truth. What we should be afraid of is not being! Don't underestimate the power of our speech! Your capacity for speech is divine! There is nothing more powerful than truth! It is not safe to speak, and it never will be! But it's even less safe not to speak! It is a balance of risks; you either pay the price for being who you are, or pay the price for being a bloody serf, one who has enslaved him or herself!

Say what you think carefully. Pay attention to your words. Truth is the cornerstone of society. Tell the truth, and see what happens. Don't lie. The enemy is a cloud of gnats. They are only courageous in groups or in mobs. Stand your ground. Be afraid, but be afraid of the right thing: not saying what you believe, because that is the same as not being! Here you are suffering away; you might as well be at the same time. At least then there is something to you!

Do you hate free speech?

Who taught young adults to oppose free speech? The universities! Postmodernists have brainwashed them into thinking their subjective versions of reality is equivalent to the objective truth! To disagree with them is tantamount to a crime! His is a generation driven mad by their good-for-nothing Marxist identity politics.

"The creation of misleading narratives and outright falsehoods to deceive the public"

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

No one has described the methodology of fake news better than Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security advisor for Barack Obama and brother of the president of CBS News, David Rhodes. Ben Rhodes cynically bragged about how the Obama administration had sold the dubious Iran deal through misinformation picked up by an adolescent but sympathetic media (for which Rhodes had only contempt). As Rhodes put it, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Translated, that meant that Rhodes and his team fed false narratives about the Iran Deal to a sympathetic but ignorant media, which used its received authority to report those narratives as “truth”—at least long enough for the agreement to be passed before its multitudinous falsehoods and side-agreements collapsed under their own weight. “We created an echo chamber,” Rhodes bragged to the New York Times: “They [reporters] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Obama’s healthcare advisor Jonathan Gruber likewise saw the virtues of fake news in pushing a political agenda. Gruber assumed that the public, not just the media, was stupid and easily conned: “Lack of transparency,” he said, “is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever.”

Again, the term “fake news” is best applied to mainstream media reporting of fantasies as facts that are demonstrably not true—and are probably known to be not true, but are thought to help advance a desired progressive political or cultural agenda.

...What unites these fake news narratives and gives them greater media resonance than other fables and urban myths is again their progressive resonance. Fake news can become a means to advance supposedly noble ends of racial, gender, class, or environmental justice—such as the need for new sexual assault protocols on campuses. Those larger aims supersede bothersome and inconvenient factual details. The larger “truth” of fake news lives on even after its facts have been utterly debunked.

...And indeed, the fake news mindset ultimately can be traced back to the campus. Academic postmodernism derides facts and absolutes, and insists that there are only narratives and interpretations that gain credence, depending on the power of the story-teller.

In sum, fake news is journalism’s popular version of the nihilism of campus postmodernism. To progressive journalists, advancing a leftwing political agenda is important enough to justify the creation of misleading narratives and outright falsehoods to deceive the public—to justify, in other words, the creation of fake but otherwise useful news.

Read more here.

"No virtue greater than authenticity, and no vice worse than phoniness"

David Ernst, writing at The Federalist, reminds us of a speech Donald Trump gave at the Al Smith dinner just days before the election.

And a special hello to all of you in this room who have known and loved me for many, many years. It’s true. The politicians. They’ve had me to their homes. They’ve introduced me to their children. I’ve become their best friends in many instances. They’ve asked for my endorsement and they’ve always wanted my money. And even called me really a dear, dear friend. But then suddenly, decided when I ran for president as a Republican, that I’ve always been a no-good, rotten, disgusting scoundrel. And they totally forgot about me.

Ernst's analysis:

In other words: even if I have been a no-good, rotten, disgusting scoundrel, what does that make you? At least I don’t pretend to be decent; you people, on the other hand, have the gall to pretend that you’re any better than I am. Let’s dispense with the fiction that you would have treated me with any less contempt if I had bothered to live up to any of your standards of decency in the first place, and acknowledge that they have nothing to do with decency per se, and everything to do with power. Your presumption of any moral superiority is a willful, bald-faced lie, and I’m going to keep calling you on that crap until it puts me in the White House.

...In contrast to the many religions, systems of moral thought, and other ancient traditions that have distinguished every effort to better the human condition, postmodernism presumes that all of these endeavors are the cause of human failure. It therefore, operates according to just one moral imperative: discredit anything that other people presume to stand for goodness, because the belief that anything is superior to anything else inevitably results in prejudice, interpersonal strife, and inequality.

Thus, the Venus de Milo has no more aesthetic value than a crucifix in a jar full of urine; Beethoven’s symphonies are no more profound than the latest round of top 40 hits; all religions are fundamentally the same, and their “moderate” postmodern adherents are all comfortably represented on the “Coexist” bumper sticker. In a sense, it isn’t culture at all, but rather an anti-culture that measures success insofar as it deconstructs anything that other people value.

Provided that the postmodern man believes in nothing and values nothing, one wouldn’t be unreasonable in concluding that he cares about nothing. But anyone who knows postmodern man also knows that nothing could be farther from the truth. Rather, the “cult of non-discrimination” is filled with bright-eyed idealism about making the world a better place, and in the cases where it challenges baseless prejudice, it does make the world a better place. Like other utopian visions that seek to remake human beings into something alien to their nature, however, it is incapable of compromise, and thus lends itself to hypocrisy and fanaticism.

PC’s fakeness is only outdone by its fanaticism, which has grown with considerable intensity in recent years. Everything from Brendan Eich’s firing from Mozilla for donating to Proposition 8 in California, to the eruption of protests on college campuses over the offensiveness of Halloween costumes, to the controversy over state laws that restrict bathroom usage according to biology rather than gender identity, suggest that the postmodern “cult of nondiscrimination” only grows more desperate the more it succeeds. What gives?

The answer is that the postmodern man ultimately finds satisfaction in the only thing that is left for him: power. Moral superiority is an undeniable source of power over other people, and postmodernism’s moral imperative offers it cheaply to anyone who accepts its premises. The power to shut others up by merely insinuating that they are a bigot is subtle, but its potency is difficult to overstate.

...As they run out of traditions, institutions, and customs to deconstruct, however, the more diluted the power rooted in their outrage becomes. Hence the growth in moral hysteria over ever smaller and more trivial things.

...As soon as the PC outrage machine decides something is wrong with whatever you think, then it has no interest in your thoughts or reasoning: you must submit or remain silent.

All this raises an uncomfortable question for people who have no use for PC’s agenda, and who value the freedom to think for themselves. How do you respond to someone who is determined to smear you for your alleged bigotry regardless of what you think and why? How do you win an argument against someone who willfully changes the meaning of words, maintains that the truth is completely relative, and feels perfectly justified in accusing virtually anyone of the gravest moral failure?

...Trump grasps our postmodern culture intuitively, and put it to use with devastating effect.

If our opponents are going to accuse us of being evil-minded bigots, regardless of what we say or think, then what’s the point in bothering to convince them otherwise? Let’s play by their own rules of relativism and subjectivity, dismiss their baseless accusations, and hammer them mercilessly where it hurts them the most: their hypocrisy. After all, if there is no virtue greater than authenticity, and no vice worse than phoniness, then the purveyors of contrived PC outrage are distinctively vulnerable.

Democrats gleefully welcomed Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries with the expectation that they’d bury him in a pile of condescension for being a buffoon and scorn for being the next Hitler. Better yet, they figured that his astounding rise confirmed everything they had long assumed about half the country and were now free to say out loud: they are indeed a basket of irredeemable racist, sexist, homophobic deplorables. Mainstream Republicans would surely hop on board the progressive train rather than be associated with these creeps.

So I’m a scoundrel because I don’t pay income taxes? Maybe so, but it also makes me smart, just like all the other billionaires who are backing your campaign. So I’m a sexist because you found a video of me bragging about how my superstar status enables me to grab women by the p—y? Maybe it does, but allow me to publically introduce four of the women who have accused your husband of everything from indecent exposure to rape. So I’m a greedy businessman who stiffs my contractors? Fine. You’re a corrupt politician who sells out our national interest to line your own pockets.

Maybe everything they say about me is true, but at least I’m authentic, at least I’m real: you on the other hand, are a bloody, disgusting hypocrite.

So say goodnight to the bad guy! Because this bad guy is now our president.

Read more here.