Former Social Justice Warrior Keri Smith explains why Social Justice as all about Power and Control

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Star Mariner (here)

I like this lady, very fair, very savvy. She has a lot of interesting things to say, all shaped by her unique perspective as a former SJW. Here she is again in a thought-provoking conversation. It's not all about Trump, or the election, but it covers a host of subjects, particularly in the long version, current to what is happening in the world today. Some powerful red-pill stuff too:

20min clip

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WR46Lo_0Vos

The full video (well worth the time)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5Hd9WCE1Lu8

Here's Keri Smith's Medium article.

• https://medium.com/unsafe-space/a-li...p-484abb7dc8aa

~~~

A Liberal for Trump

I’m voting for Trump because the Democratic Party is no longer liberal.

Hello, my name is Keri and I’m a liberal who is voting for Donald Trump.

A little background, I used to be a “Social Justice Warrior.” For 20 years I was a true believer, who preached this evil ideology, fully convinced that it was the way to end racism and sexism. It took me two decades to realize it IS racism. It IS sexism.

Before the 2016 election, I went down a rabbit hole of videos of Trump supporters being assaulted by people who were supposed to be on my side, who were supposed to be liberals and progressives. I was left in tears, utterly shocked and repulsed. Because the legacy media had not told me this was happening. Matter of fact, they had sold me, and I had bought without sufficient evidence, the opposite narrative.

I still cried the night Trump won. Because I still believed the things I was told to believe about him, without forming my own opinion. Social Justice Warriors do a lot of that. But it became really important for me to figure out why he won, because I wanted to prevent it from happening again in 2020.

So I started leaving my carefully cultivated echochamber. I started seeking out other points of view, and actually *listening* to why people voted for him, instead of projecting and telling them what the media had told me were their reasons. I started meeting Trump voters, most of whom did not fit the stereotype I’d been sold.

And in the past four years I watched as my old ideology, Social Justice Marxism, went mainstream. In the past few months in particular it has become culturally dominant to the point where it is being spoken by all of our major corporations, by academia, by entertainment, by Big Social, by the Legacy Media, and by the Democratic Party, my old party.

Social Justice Marxism teaches us that the way to end racism and sexism is by becoming racists and sexists. It tells us we MUST treat people differently on the basis of race and sex. It teaches us it’s impossible to be racist towards one particular race or one particular sex — gee I wonder what could possibly go wrong with indoctrinating children to believe this?

Social Justice Marxists LIE. Look at their behavior and see if it matches up even with their redefined words. It doesn’t. They tell us that we must shut up and listen to black voices, listen to women, listen to gay people and trans people. Oh but, not that black person, or that woman, or that gay person or that trans person. Or that one or that one or that one or that one.

What they REALLY mean is that we must speak their ideology, and only their ideology, or else remain quiet. They are the FIRST to use racist and sexist and homophobic slurs against anyone brave enough to stand up to their backwards beliefs.

This cancerous ideology is now being forced on us in cult-like indoctrination seminars in our workplaces. It’s in our churches. It’s in our hobby groups. I was indoctrinated into it in college 20 years ago, but it is now being forced on children in public schools as early as Kindergarten.

Heck, it’s even being pushed on babies — babies — I kid you not, with books like “Antiracist Baby” becoming trendy in this illiberal Cultural Revolution. And the Democrats support all of this. They are no longer a party of liberalism, but a party of Social Justice Marxism and authoritarianism.

Well I AM a liberal and I will not allow these Marxist totalitarians to redefine that word, the way they try to redefine so many. There is nothing liberal about supporting censorship by Big Social OR the government. There is nothing liberal about supporting violence by speaking LIES that conflate violence with speech, in order to justify violence as a response to speech. Silence is NOT violence. Words are NOT violence.

There is nothing liberal about indoctrinating generations of children into racism and sexism and saying it’s ok because you call it “anti-racism” and “feminism.” Clever, but you’re lying. There is nothing progressive about pushing escalating numbers of children to medically transition, only to mock and demean them if they later detransition.

There is nothing progressive about wishing death on people who disagree with you, about celebrating when a terrorist shoots up a Republican baseball game, about gravedancing when cops — both black and white — are gunned down at a Black Lives Matter rally.

I am a liberal who is voting for Trump because I am deeply worried about the state of our country and about the erosion of cultural values like free speech, equality, the non-aggression principle, reason, logic, objectivity and individualism.

I am a liberal who is voting for Donald Trump because I OPPOSE racism and sexism, and I see that my old party, the Democratic party, has been entirely eaten up with cancerous racist and sexist beliefs. A mind-virus that threatens to make monsters of men and to end civilization as we know it.

I am a liberal who is voting for Trump, because despite the names I will be called, and the friends I have lost and will lose, I believe he is the person running who has demonstrated the most commitment to ending war, the most commitment to individualism and equality, the most commitment to free speech.

In short, I am a liberal who is voting for Trump because I think he is the most liberal of the candidates I can choose from. And let me say a word about others like me who are a part of #WalkAway, and those I’ve been blessed to get to know in the past year or so — nobody willingly subjects themselves to social ostracism, to name-calling and insults, to risk of losing their job, to risk of losing their family’s safety — without GOOD reason. And that reason is a pursuit of truth.

Mark Granovetter proposed threshold theory as a way of understanding riots. He said that there are those in a riot who have a threshold of zero, who will be the first to throw a rock, and there are not many of those. But then there are those with a threshold of 1, who will be emboldened to throw a rock as long as one other person is already doing it.

And then there are those with a threshold of 2, and so on, until you get a full on mob or riot happening. I think this theory explains what is happening in the Democratic party today — not only in regards to actual riots, but in regards to why so many are now mindlessly parroting racist and sexist social justice beliefs. Because others are doing it.

Well the opposite is true too. I believe in a threshold theory for truth. I believe there are those, and there are relatively few of them, who have a threshold of zero and who will be the first to speak truth, even when they are mocked and maligned and threatened and lied about. And those brave people encourage others, they encourage those with a threshold of 1, to start speaking truth because they see at least one other person doing it, no matter the consequences. And those people inspire those with a threshold of 2, and so on, until truth prevails.

One person turning on their light, can spark others to turn on their light. Martin Luther King Jr famously said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Or in the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a man who brought down a version of this ideology once before, simply by speaking the truth: “To stand up for truth is nothing. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph…. But not through me.”

Written by Keri Smith:

• @ksemamajama
• Co-Host at https://unsafespace.com
• Founder of https://civilitydinners.com
• More about me: http://www.wearebird.co/keri-smith

[Gemma13]

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/1...l-campaigning/


WOKENESS IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR POLITICAL CAMPAIGNING

Paul Embery on the sad growth of social-justice activism.
7 Dec, 2020

2020 has been the most woke year on record. Despite the distraction of a major global pandemic, identitarian activists have ramped up their censorious and illiberal campaigns, and the culture war has escalated to new heights. From Black Lives Matter to the transgender movement, the cult of social justice is rapidly establishing itself as the new political normal. And, despite widespread frustration among the general public, neither Labour nor the Conservatives seem willing to challenge it.

Paul Embery is a trade unionist, writer and author of Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class. He joined spiked editor Brendan O’Neill for the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: In your book, you talk about ‘the religion of liberal wokedom’. Could you describe for our listeners how you understand it, and what it means to you?

Paul Embery: Wokeness is about people who are very pretentious in regard to certain social causes. But that is also coupled with a real, deep intolerance towards people who disagree. I think it is about people trying to signal their virtue by expressing fashionable moral or political opinions, or denouncing someone for expressing unfashionable ones. They often do this by spreading a hashtag or wearing a bracelet – the kind of stuff I refer to in my book as woke slacktivism. In my experience, many of these people have no real interest or involvement in grassroots political organising or campaigning. They think campaigning can be done simply sitting behind the keyboard and sharing a meme. That is not a substitute for the hard yards of political campaigning.

I have time for people like Marcus Rashford, who has taken what he considers to be an injustice, and lobbied, spoken to politicians and raised interest in it. But I have very little time for people who sit on their iPhones and just tap furiously in an attempt to gain some social kudos by being seen to be woke. That does not impress me at all.

O’Neill: Do you think this represents a broader shift, from a left that was concerned with tangible problems like the economy, jobs, housing, and people’s living conditions, towards a left obsessed with less tangible issues like cultural attitudes, what people say about trans people, and whether they speak the right political language? In your book, you talk about how a lot of the rot of contemporary left politics set in from the 1960s onwards, when there was a shift towards a new left. That left, as it has developed, has tended to leave working-class people behind because they do not share its outlook in terms of the religion of liberal wokedom and the rise of woke slacktivism.

Embery: Yes, and I think the two go hand in hand. That shift has occurred because the left itself has fundamentally changed. The Labour Party today is far more middle class, urban based, liberal and cosmopolitan than ever before. Because of that, it has adopted a different agenda to the traditional one, which mattered to working people. I am not saying it does not discuss those things, like housing and wages – it does. But it also spends an obsessive amount of time discussing issues that, for the vast majority of working-class people, are not particularly important.

Ordinary working people, when you speak to them on the doorstep, are worried about jobs, wages, their families, and issues like immigration and law and order. They want to talk about the things that actually impact on them day to day. And they would want a Labour Party that claims to speak for them to put those issues front and centre. But the amount of time Labour activists spend on things like LGBT rights, gender identity and climate change is in inverse proportion to the amount of time people in working-class communities spend on them. Until there is a major recalibration in language and emphasis on the left, Labour has no chance of winning again.

O’Neill: Anyone who says that sections of the left have a disproportionate focus on issues which most people consider to be fairly minor runs the risk of being told they think all working-class people are homophobic or do not care about gay rights. I do not think that at all. I think the opposite, in fact. I think there is a huge amount of tolerance in working-class communities and the rest of the country for gay relationships, for trans people, for all those forms of living.. In a way, these issues have become not simply things the left can obsess about, but almost useful tools for pushing back against and correcting the supposed wrongthink of vast swathes of the country. These issues have become means through which, quite opportunistically, sections of the left are almost chipping away at some of the things you write about in the book – the traditional convictions and beliefs of a majority of people in the country.

Embery: The big problem for the left is that it is all very well trying to foist this new way of thinking on people, but if you have not actually won hearts and minds, it becomes meaningless. As we have seen in Britain, and to a certain degree in America, that kind of wokeness does not penetrate the ballot box. People hit back at the establishment over Brexit, and in America the Rust Belt elected Trump in 2016.

I believe what you said – the vast majority of people in this country are tolerant. We have made huge progress on things like gay rights, for example. Abuse still happens, of course, but we have eradicated so much of that kind of stuff. But the idea that people who still hold some traditional, dare we say socially conservative, views should not be allowed to express them or should be denounced if they do is the very opposite of tolerance.

Maurice Glasman says there is none so intolerant as those who preach tolerance, and none so exclusionary as those who promote inclusiveness. I think that is very true. I see it all the time on the left. [B]You argue particular opinions and people’s chins hit the floor, because they cannot believe someone on the left is arguing such a thing.[/B]

O’Neill: You mentioned wokeness not doing well at the ballot box. I think the most remarkable event of this year and possibly of the past four or five years was Donald Trump getting 74million votes in the presidential election in November. It tells us there are tens of millions of people who are still incredibly dissatisfied with the status quo ante, with establishment politics, with technocracy. And of course, we saw a similar thing here when the Red Wall revolted against Labour and voted for Boris last year. But even though wokeness does not do well at the ballot box, we always seem to end up with it anyway. It strikes me that the people who voted for Boris in December 2019 were not particularly woke. And yet, we have an administration which seems to be going down the woke route. It was very cowardly in relation to the Black Lives Matter protests in terms of defending statues, for example. How would you explain this disconnect, not simply between the left and working-class voters, but between the broader establishment and working-class voters?

Embery: There is an awful lot of personal cowardice around at the top of politics. Politicians are frightened to be the first to say we need to push back against this nonsense. When you speak to politicians and others in senior positions, often they will say this stuff is mad, but what they say privately is often different to what they say publicly. We cannot put faith in politicians to address this. We need a united front across wider society.

There was the recent example of Greg Clarke, chairman of the Football Association, who made a simple slip in a meeting with politicians, and had to resign. Ironically, he was talking about the need to overcome discrimination in football and said something that nowadays is deemed to be offensive. He clearly did not mean any offence by it. In a sensible society, he would have earned at most a mild rebuke. But it is not a sensible society anymore. If you are in a position of authority, even the merest slip means people want your head on a platter and your reputation is destroyed.

Senior politicians are simply not brave enough to do the job for us on this. Like many things in life, it is going to fall to other people to do it.

[Bill Ryan]

Another excellent interview with Keri Smith, just over a week old. Of all the voices out there (and there are quite a few now), she may be most intelligent, articulate, and perceptive about all the dangers that the very authoritarian Social Justice mindset presents.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uVSgVlZjk8c

[Bill Ryan]

Bumping this wonderful thread with Keri Smith's YouTube channel, called Deprogrammed.

https://youtube.com/@RealKeriSmith/videos

There's a host of terrific content here. Here's the text of the 'About' page:

~~~

Keri Smith spent over 20 years in the Social Justice ("Woke") cult, picking it up at Duke University in the late 1990s and then pushing the ideology through her work in the entertainment industry with comedians. After a slow process of waking up and leaving the cult over a period of years, she started Deprogrammed as a series of interviews intended to better understand and make sense of her old belief system, Social Justice (aka "Woke") ideology.

Deprogrammed is committed to fostering conversation, creating a culture that respects freedom of speech, and making space for both reason and faith.