Rapper Kanye West used to be "woke", I gather. Now he's "redpilled." The same is true of Candace Owens, aka "RedPillBlack" on YouTube. As an aside, note that Candace's channel asks whether you're sick of the "alt-left." You don't know us, Candace. How can you be sick of us? Anyway, Kanye West recently tweeted that he "loved the way Candace Owens thinks." This is a bad thing as far as the Daily Beast is concerned: "Meet Candace Owens, Kanye West’s Toxic Far-Right Consigliere." This can't be good. We are warned. It's coming from the Daily Beast, after all. Ms. Owens must surely be little more than Eva Braun in blackface.
Given the stringent ideological conformity expected out of "marginalized" people in the wokesphere, it's hard not to applaud the ones that do manage to pop the red pill and break free of the Social Justice Inc. narratives we all get spoonfed on a daily basis. "Free thinking is a super power" Kanye West recently tweeted. And I couldn't agree more.
But is substituting being "woke" for being "redpilled" really free thinking?
In a recent Quilette article, Cathy Young tells us:
This is a healthy discussion. Unfortunately, in their understandable frustration with the social and racial orthodoxies that currently dominate liberal political culture, conservatives and libertarians risk embracing self-styled dissenters who are (to borrow a term from the social justice left) problematic allies.Ya think?
It's not an uncommon thing these days to see one-time progressives, social justice warriors and others on the left become disillusioned, then finding themselves descending rabbit-holes at the bottom of which are world views that I'd be very hard pressed to describe as at all preferable to the excesses of social justice.
As alt-left OG Rabbit blogs in his introductory article to alt-left thought:
Several months ago I noticed a guy following me on Twitter with the username, “A Clockwork Green.” In his bio, he identified as “AltLeft, racially aware white.” He deactivated his account, and I have no idea what ever happened to him. Shortly before he disappeared though, he had expressed his distaste for a lot of the rhetoric of the AltRight and seemed somewhat disillusioned. I began to wonder how many others there were like him. How many white progressives have begun to reject the politically correct narrative and secretly venture into thought crime circles on the web? I’m willing to bet it’s probably more than you think. Of those that pop the purple pill and make the trip…how many see all the boilerplate, post libertarian corporate conservatism, radical traditionalist Christianism, 15th century LARPing, pseuoscientific anti vaccination stuff and wacky conspiracy theories being promoted and decide “Fuck this. These people are freaks. Maybe the social justice crowd isn’t so bad after all.”He goes on to say:
Then there are the ones who stick around. Seriously though, who are the AltLeft anyway? Who are we? I would say that the majority are white people who hold a lot of typically leftist views on economics, the environment and some social issues, yet at some point realized the new left had become hostile to any white person even slightly reluctant to act as a scapegoat for everybody else’s problems. No self respecting white person would want to be associated with a movement that trashes their heroes, their culture, their history, denies their achievements…a movement which seeks to destroy their civilization and erases their identity. Hell, besides all that, a lot of “cultural marxism” (or whatever) has become so freaky that most normal white feminists and gays are probably weirded out by it.The anti white, anti male pathology on the mainstream left is glaring, and you'd have to be blind not to see it. This recent Guardian article on "How white women use strategic tears to avoid accountability" is an excellent case in point. My only issue with this particular article is that I find white feminists hard to sympathize with when it wasn't so long ago that they were writing similar tripe about male liberal sympathizers. Not that white/male allies are beyond reproach, but one must wonder why much of the white race hasn't been driven to Nazism by now given the abuse heaped on them in the progressive press.
Perhaps it's because we know that Nazism is far, far worse, given its track record. Hitler was the worst thing to ever happen to the Germanic race he so professed to love. But even closer to the center, the right wing has given us ample reasons thus far not to trust them. Is abandoning Trump = Hitler scaremongering in favor of hysteria that equates the Obama and Clinton democrats with communism so reasonable? Say what you will about either Lenin's politburo or the corporatist hacks at the DNC, they're most definitely not the same ideologically.
Are bizarre anti-Semetic conspiracy theories really so good an immunizing agent against the self loathing of the critical theory curriculum? It's good to abandon the oversimplified ideological tripe of The Guardian or the Huffington Post. Not so good when Infowars or Rebel Media are what take their place.
The threat of the so called red-pill becomes more insidious, in fact, the more "reasonable" the right wing thought embraced ends up being. Neofascist hate groups and conspiracy mongers make good comic book villains and objects of ridicule. Mainstream conservatism, however, is what's done more real harm in the last half century than any ideological fad in the free world, including intersectional social justice on college campuses, a distant second by comparison.
The reasons are made abundantly clear in Thomas Frank's 2004 opus, "What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America:"
The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.As concise a definition of the right wing in practice as any I've ever seen.
Much as I loathe SJWs, I can't help but think that above paragraph describes something that's done vastly more harm to fabric of the western civilization so precious to the right wing than any so called cultural Marxism - again something I'm no fan of, ever has. Even the Trump administration - for all its vaunted breaks from the mainstream Republican past, for all the 'never Trump' hysteria to come from the GOP's own ranks, note that the largest legislative achievement of this administration thus far and its congress is ... wait for it ... you guessed it! The November 2017 tax cuts!
The online right is replete with disillusioned leftists pushed to the right - "redpilled" - by some or another negative experience with the regressive left. These disillusioned leftists are not to be blamed. The regressive left has only itself to blame for its defectors.
But the red pill comes with baggage of its own. It will not ultimately be cheap for those who take it. Unless, of course, they're high income and can afford a Cadillac health care plan. Because it won't be covered by most high-deductible employer health care plans, you're not going to belong to a union strong enough to negotiate a health plan that will cover it, there won't be any commie universal health care or even medicare, medicaid or public option, and there won't be any generic alternatives available for a long, long time yet.
Because shrugging all of the above off as unworkable communism is what you're buying into when you shift your politics to the right.
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