The New Culture War: Two Good Reads
Yeah, What It's All About
Remember the Culture War? That was when deplorable normals tried to defend their lives from the cultural depredations of the Leftist elites.
The buzz today is about the “hypocrisy” of the Leftist elite covorting maskless at the Met Gala--whatever that is. I guess if, like me, you’d need to look that up, then you’d be hopelessly out of place at the event. But is it really about hypocrisy? Maybe something else is in play. Maybe this reveals the hidden truth of the Covid Regime: is it all about the elites exulting in their supremacy, their victory over the deplorables?
Glenn Greenwald takes a deep dive--he never does less--into this aspect:
The Masking of the Servant Class: Ugly COVID Images From the Met Gala Are Now Commonplace
While AOC's revolutionary and subversive socialist gown generated buzz, the normalization of maskless elites attended to by faceless servants is grotesque.
A few quick excerpts will give you the flavor. Greenwald leads off with some examples of Leftist hypocrisy. Here’s a good one:
Photos released last November of California Governor Gavin Newsom giggling maskless as he sat with other maskless state health officials celebrating the birthday of a powerful lobbyist — just one month after he told the public to “to keep your mask on in between bites” and while severe state-imposed restrictions were in place regarding leaving one's home
Yeah, I think that qualifies as ‘grotesque’ by most standards--just not Leftist ones.
But then Greenwald gets to the nub of it all--the messaging. The Left wants us to know something. Something about them, and something about us. Who they are, and who we are:
But as is so often the case, the most disturbing aspects of elite behavior are found not in what they have prohibited but rather in what they have decided is permissible. When it comes to mask mandates, it is now commonplace to see two distinct classes of people: those who remain maskless as they are served, and those they employ as their servants who must have their faces covered at all times. Prior to the COVID pandemic, it was difficult to imagine how the enormous chasm between the lives of cultural and political elites and everyone else could be made any larger, yet the pandemic generated a new form of crude cultural segregation: a series of protocols which ensure that maskless elites need not ever cast eyes upon the faces of their servant class.
‘Cultural segregation.’ Or, if you prefer, class segregation. Greenwald is definitely on to something important. The masks are symbolic.
Another fairly well known example--Pelosi’s big Napa fundraiser:
But what was most striking about Pelosi's donor event was not the possibility of legal infractions but rather the two-tiered system that was so viscerally and uncomfortably obvious.
Even though many of the wealthy white donors had no food in front of them and were not yet eating, there was not a mask in sight — except on the faces of the overwhelmingly non-white people hired as servants, all of whom had their gratuitous faces covered. Servants, apparently, are much more pleasant when they are dehumanized. There is no need for noses or mouths or other identifiable facial features for those who are converted into servile robots.
There’s lots, lots more, but the conclusion is worth it:
But all of this stopped being about The Science™ long ago — ever since months of relentless messaging that it is our moral duty to Stay At Home unless we want to sociopathically kill Grandma was replaced overnight by dictates that we had a moral duty to leave our homes to attend densely packed street protests since the racism being protested was a more severe threat to the public health than the global COVID pandemic. One can locate in all of this jumbled and always-shifting rationale various forms of control, shaming, stigma and hierarchy, while The Science™ is nowhere to be found.
Even with all of this deceit and manipulation, there is something uniquely disturbing — creepy even — about becoming accustomed to seeing political and cultural elites wallowing in luxury without masks, while those paid small wages to serve them in various ways are forced to keep cloth over their faces. It is a powerful symbol of the growing rot at the core of America's cultural and social balkanization: a maskless elite attended to by a permanently faceless servant class. The country's workers have long been faceless in a figurative sense, and now, thanks to extremely selective application of decisively unscientific COVID restrictions, that condition has become literal.
Relatedly, Zerohedge had an interesting post about Google work practices--and how much more Leftist elite can you get than Google?
Google, who hilariously is included in many "ESG" funds, underpaid "thousands" of international contract workers across several countries, a new report by the New York Times revealed on Friday.
Even better is the fact that the big tech company reportedly discovered it was violating pay-parity laws in numerous countries and then chose "not to immediately compensate the underpaid temporary staff," according to follow up reporting by Insider.
…
The company also reportedly banned contractors from talking to full time employees and made temps "wear red badges" that led to a "sense of shame", one employee told Insider.
And there’s more--but you get the picture. Learn to code, be a serf! Greenwald says it well:
@ggreenwald
The more you learn about Google's stranglehold over media and political discourse, and their aggressive use of its monopoly power to destroy competitors and suppress criticisms of them, the more you realize what an evil company it is: a grave, unaccountable threat to democracies.
It’s almost enough to make you wonder whether Google is some sort of CIA conspiracy.
In more upbeat news:
New York teachers protest vaccine mandates, march across Brooklyn Bridge: 'I call the shots'
Retired and current teachers were also seen protesting vaccine mandates in Foley Square
A teacher's group protesting mandatory vaccinations was seen in New York City marching across the Brooklyn Bridge, with some protesters chanting against President Biden.
"F--k Joe Biden," people were heard chanting while walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, in a video posted to Twitter on Monday.
Videos of that protest plus other NYC anti-regime protests at the link.
One thing about Substack and email distribution, it tends to work against updates a bit. This post is, in fact, updated re Google.
Not so O/T, about aspects of the culture war, from Jen Dyer days ago, in “Rule by hate, lies, and death cults”:
< The world has never been in this place before. There have been breakdowns of order over large swaths of the earth, but never before without the safety valve of ill-traveled, unmapped hinterlands, conveniently separating ruling hatreds from each other, muffling the echo of *lies*….
One of the biggest, which many will think of as the first really big one they came to recognize, is the *enormous* lie, that Donald Trump was in some sort of vague, undefined “collusion” scheme with Russia about the 2016 election, a scheme that required years of “investigation.” Oddly, I was in a position to see through that lie almost immediately, and yet it took *me longer* than immediately, to recognize what the “investigation” was really intended for.
The information that told me the “collusion” allegation itself was a big lie was, Devin Nunes’s initial revelation about the electronic spying on Trump and his associates. Nunes announced what he had learned in March 2017, and it took only a brief period of cogitation for me to realize, that none of the allegations *could be* true. The Nunes statements meant, that the Obama administration had already spied out years’ worth of information about Trump and his connections – and yet had obviously found nothing….
When the common understanding is being ruled or forcibly overwritten by lies, it can be hard to remember what the actual lies are, as opposed to disputes of opinion. In the case of the 2020 election, the big lie is *not what* people probably think.
The big lie is the claim, that anyone has ever *genuinely investigated* the extensive evidence of irregularities, and demonstrated that they didn’t affect the electoral outcome.
That has never happened; it’s a lie to say it did…. >