cashew | First Contrapoints, now Lindsay Ellis

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I'm so genuinely fucking done with the "progressives". I still believe in the values (equity of opportunity, social safety nets, addressing white supremacy, etc.), but the gatekeeping-purity-test-call-out B.S. virtue signaling that they engage in has basically turned me numb towards their anger.

I've been angry about this for years now. I recall pointing out the toxicity of call-out culture about 5-6 years ago to a person who responded with the comeback that these are rare examples, that it's not the whole of the movement, that this isn't somehow representative of the progressives, it's just the right wing conservatives turning exceptions into talking points as a way of de-legitimizing the leftist movements...

But it isn't an exception or isolated incident. This trend has happened before. It's called the Cultural Revolution. People in the West like to pretend that it was caused by "totalitarian leadership"...but that's the lie. It was a populous leftist ideology purity gatekeeping call-out movement. The people, those who were resentful/unsure/projecting their own insecurities about their own internalized bigotry, attacked and deplatformed and publicly assaulted those who were relatively (and only relatively) more privileged by going after not only the individual, but also that individual's family and friends. The ones who fell to the persecution were the intellectuals, a lot of whom were allies to the oppressed: academics, authors, screenwriters, teachers, union leaders etc. People who, in modern terms, weren't woke enough for the leftist mob and thus the people deemed they had to "get taken down a peg". The woke people did it to their own allies. And it grew into a fucking monster.

Because the government themselves were left, so they encouraged the mob to keep going, keep rooting out all those who didn't pass the purity test. Keep calling out. Keep publicly shaming. Make it socially unacceptable to express certain opinions because it isn't "Politically Correct". And those standards kept shifting. If you say something wrong, that makes you a bad person and you must be purged from society. And by purged, we mean killed and dead.

Politically Correct was a term coined in the Cultural Revolution. By the left.

Did the right appropriate those words and use it to de-legitimize reasonable demands for reform against the current scourge of bigotry that plagues American politics? Yes.

Did the left go fucking insane and ate itself in a performative outrage? Also yes.

And the greatest irony of all this? The very group that is out there persecuting and calling-out minor influencers and trying to deplatform them is the very same group that condemn the CCP's thought policing. They don't even recognize they're doing the exact same thing. Fucking hypocrites.