>>160838, >>160839, >>160840, >>160841, >>160842, >>160843, >>160844, >>160845, >>160846, >>160847, >>160848
What we didn't know at the time, but that I do know now, is that what academic Leftism was producing is nothing other than a new, American-context version of Maoism. The "pedagogy of discomfort" is about the process of "struggle" through "criticism and self-criticism." And I could go on (literally, working on a book about this, so at a lot of length).
So we were right. What we saw in academic Leftism is, at the very least, the seed of a genocide, maybe even its first sprouts.
That observation wasn't made in isolation, of course. By that point, @peterboghossian, @HPluckrose, and I had been fighting "Social Justice ideology" for years. Peter was being subjected to it routinely in institutional policy at Portland State University where he worked. We were seeing it everywhere in the world (at least online) and working its way into real policy decisions, in universities, K-12 schools, government, companies, and beyond. That's why we were trying to do something.
The things Peter was facing at Portland State were solid evidence of the effects this ideology would have when institutionalized. We had seen similar outbursts at universities across America, not least the very famous 2015 outburst against Nicholas Christakis at Yale. BLM had gone fairly wild through 2015 as well in the wake of Michael Brown's death for charging a cop, which they spun into a ridiculous victim-martyr narrative quite successfully. We knew academic Leftism was a major problem.
In short, we did the Grievance Studies Affair because we already believed this ideology, which was being developed, certified, and taught in academic Leftism, which we now call "Woke Leftism," threatened to unravel society.
So in early 2018, a few weeks after the peer-review comments came back about that paper with those ominous suggestions, I asked my wife if I could quit my job (yes, famously now as a massage therapist) and dedicate everything to studying and exposing this evil ideology as fast as I could, hoping it wasn't already too late.
All peers I had to my left politically rejected me completely for this stand. They told me ominously that there was no stopping what's coming and whatever other nonsense I'm hearing again today from new peers. They threatened us, mocked us, slandered us, you name it. So what?
So I picked up the cause of exposing the ideology that's now unraveling society and threw myself into it fully and have never looked back.
That's not my point, though. My point is that this ideology, which is at the heart of our entire educational system from the very bottom up to the research-frontier top, in almost every academically informed professional association, etc. etc. etc., will unravel society. We were right.
In fact, it is unraveling society, and we are now near a point of no return. We must fight this evil ideology and remove it from our educational institutions. We must finish the work the Grievance Studies Affair sought to begin: to delegitimize everything from academic and activist Leftist ideology passing itself off as serious, professional work or anything like best-practices, and to get it out of the institutional tier of our society.
Ultimately, the point of this work is ideological subversion, as Yuri Bezmenov explained it. We're now approaching the end of Stage 2 of Ideological Subversion (destabilization), having already been demoralized (Stage 1) largely through the incorporation of what came out of academic Leftism throughout the institutional apparatuses of our society. Stage 3 comes next, if we go there. Stage 3 is "crisis." It is fast, brutal, and terrible, and through it we lose our society.
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