54 Comments

I'm so glad you exist and you write.

Expand full comment

Thanks, Josh! BTW, did you get the email I sent to us@dis...? It just said I'm available if you still want to have me on to discuss that LWA paper. No big deal if you filled up the show already, though!

Expand full comment

I did get your email. You've missed no opportunities, don't worry. I'm on death watch this week for a dying friend. Everyhting else is secondary for the moment. I'll be in touch though.

Expand full comment

Not only does he write, he brings us the writings of other greats.

As sanity triumphs over insanity, we owe thanks to Harrison for this work.

Expand full comment

I just found this on Notes and I could not agree more.

Expand full comment

OK, I checked it out quick - is it a "mother" issue that makes you disaffected?

If so, join the club I reckon, but a mother has got to do what a mother has got to do.

Just like Russia has got to do what must be done....we all know. Bullies always meet their fate.

So, I'm not trying to pick on you and if you think I am please tell me to shut my trap, but some things are obvious and seems to me the woke ones been sleeping are in for a hard lesson.

Expand full comment

I'm glad you exist as well and maybe I'll check out your writing.

You say you are "disaffected" - why should I check that out if you don't mind me asking?

I'm sure Henderson and Hanania don't mind this query.

Expand full comment

BK, Josh has an excellent show called Disaffected. You can find it on Rumble, YouTube, and podcast platforms. For the background to the show, watch/listen to the first 2 episodes, where Josh gives the background on his mother. Also, check out my two interviews with him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNQFu82cdLA&t=2446s&pp=ygUSbWluZG1hdHRlcnMgc2xvY3Vt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNxxVdwBYaY&pp=ygUSbWluZG1hdHRlcnMgc2xvY3Vt

Expand full comment

Presently I'm boycotting youtube.

But I'm not boycotting Josh - I'll check it out eventually I reckon.

Expand full comment

I just clicked the first link and the time frame was slowed down - is this intentional? I hope not.

I've clicked on the 2nd link now, had to search around timewise but it is also being restricted/delayed. It could be a "glitch" just now, but I know this - this sort of thing happens all the time, but I appreciate you providing the "non-Y-tube" links and I will listen when the sound comes in properly if it ever does.

Expand full comment

no

Expand full comment

Yes, it began with my severely personality disordered mother (the type of person Harrison talks about). Then I began to see that it's everwhere in public today.

If you check out my Substack, notice that there is an introductory post pinned to the top. That will tell you what it's all about.

Thanks!

Expand full comment

This is a brilliant essay, despite the unfortunate comment about the vaccine at the end. Really disappointed in that. But again, good insights and there isn’t much I disagree with. Except that it’s good to remember that there is a large degree of difference between communist regimes and wokes in degree of repression, and that’s very important. Liberalism creates spaces to escape from woke and they’ll always be there unless we go full totalitarian, which I don’t think there’s evidence for.

Expand full comment

I hope we don't go full totalitarian, but I won't rule it out. Agreed, re: difference of degree. Mark Bisone (who also commented here) has a recent post on today's quality of sinners that I think is relevant. Carrying that over to this context, we have a whole lot of tini-tyrants. The commies had the gulag, bullets through the spinal cord, and torture chambers. We currently have a digital gulag.

Expand full comment

What makes the vaccine comment unfortunate?

Expand full comment

No one needs to be reminded to "remember" that. It reads more like an implied statement that others (people who are not you) are over-emotional, exaggerating, and have no reason at all to fear things getting worse.

It's also a handy way to poo-poo the problems we do have. I mean, after all, it's not full Communist, so why are we complaining?

Expand full comment

This ties into Mark's post that I described above. Here's the link: https://markbisone.substack.com/p/the-screwtape-stratagem

"In Screwtape’s view of the war, this model of lower-intensity but wider-range corruption marks a signification advantage. Though few in number, the evil shepherds would corrupt their flocks from a much safer distance, slowly dissolving their ability to distinguish not only virtue from vice, but freedom from servitude and Self from Other."

Lower-intensity but wider-range corruption. I think that's a great description of where we're at today. In some ways, given the state of today's tech, some aspects are WORSE now than they were then.

Expand full comment

In isolation, I agree that propaganda itself doesn't permanently sever the reality of beauty and truth. But there's the head-meds to factor in, often prescribed from very young ages. Also the depersonalizing engines of cyberspace. As a combined assault, the damage can be extreme, and take an equally extreme effort to undo.

Expand full comment

Yeah, people in past times seem to have suffered an abundance of frontal brain damage from birth complications, among other things. These days we have many other factors instead.

Expand full comment

Lead poisoning too

Expand full comment

My main observation of the woke, is that they are basically 'resentful losers'. That is not an insult, but a description. Its like Revenge of the Nerds, writ large. All the people from high school, probably starting in the1960s, who were social outcasts (for whatever reason, unfair or not), saved up and nurtured their resentment for decades, never came to resolve it or find inner peace, and now is their time to get back at the 'beautiful people'. Stacey Abrams has admitted as much. Its all driven by resentment, and its ugly.

Expand full comment

Speaking of resentful (and angry) losers isn't that exactly the emotional disposition that created both the Tea Party movement and the Trump inspired Maga movement too.

Meanwhile as far as I can make out most of those actively involved in "woke"-inspired theatrics would be under 30 years of age. But even then their numbers are miniscule compared to those involved in the Tea Party phenomenon and especially (now) the Maga movement.

Expand full comment

The "Tea Party" movement is an interesting study in contrasts and origins, as compared with the Make America Great Again movement.

The Tea Party movement began as a response to increased taxation that represented redistribution to private citizens and commercial interests. As far as I could determine at the time, they were focused around market distortions. There appeared to be a few deep thinkers involved, but the nature of mass movements led to what appeared to be oversimplifications represented by such catchphrases as "the magic of the marketplace." As is typical of such nascent mass movements, they were a loose coalition, with all of the ideological diversity that such coalitions usually contain.

What was significant about them wasn't the nationalistic aspect, as much as the demographic, at least so it seemed to me. Those individuals that I encountered that proselytized the party's talking points such as smaller government and tax reduction, were of an economic class that had benefited from corporate investment providing passive income, and desired to retain a higher percentage of that income. I may be missing some essential point, but the above is what I gleaned from acquaintances involved with their activities.

When we fast-forward to the Make America Great Again movement, I think we are observing the result of the Tea Party's essential cognitive dissonance. The majority of either movement seem largely unaware of economic fundamentals, but the Make America Great Again movement appears to have arisen as the result of offshoring, automation and capital concentration.

Your question was regarding emotional expression, and it seems to be fear owing to financial stresses in both instances. The geographic severance of production from distribution, combined with increasingly unfettered capital migration, serves to accelerate monetary velocity at the apex of the Pareto distribution curve. As a variation from historical mercantilist market models, this ascendance of monetary velocity produces visible changes in localized commercial enterprise.

As industrial activity declines in urban areas and secondary conversion of extractive commodities decline in rural communities, localized deflationary trends alter the physical landscape and the changes in income distribution rearrange choice architecture in ways perceived as destabilizing. Objectively, we may agree that they are.

Demagoguery has, in both movements, served to obscure, rather than illuminate, the root causes of the misery and suffering incurred when the floor beneath living standard requirements remains fixed and cash flows required to remain on that floor have diminished. I would opine that the Make America Great Again movement is at least incrementally closer to a grasp of the fundamentals.

I'm going to stick with fear as the primary emotional component, because population increases and concentrations have radically diminished the ability of the working and lower middle classes to lower their living standards in response to macroeconomic contractions. Some are resentful, others angry, and every mass movement has elements of those emotions, but they are secondary to the existential threat posed by an expanding rentier class.

Expand full comment

And for the record, the resentment basis of their thinking is self-evident - any philosophy or movement that is uniquely focused on others (supposed oppressors) who have what you supposedly don't have (privilege) is basically the definition of resentment. The opposite of this woke movement is a philosophy and attitude of gratitude, the literal opposite of resentment. Gratitude makes you happy, resentment makes you bitter. And always looking for problems and grievance.

Expand full comment

I also think that the leading edge of the woke are baby boomers, all this started in the 1960s. There are legions of left-leaning people today stewing in resentment, guilt and self-loathing. Right wing people have their own problems, but in the USA today, its not mainly resentment. Here is one of my fav videos, explaining briefly how Lenin and Bolsheviks used resentment to stir up revolution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TK9c-caEcw

Expand full comment

"I didn't much like that." Classic.

Expand full comment

<<"But even then their numbers are miniscule compared to those involved in the Tea Party phenomenon and especially (now) the Maga movement.">>

And that makes it all the more obscene that these Marxcissist wokesters have such outsized political and corporate power today. They are a small and unhinged minority that is deeply resented by a growing number of the citizenry, yet they are able to censor their critics and promote their toxic agitprop from the tops of our civilization's biggest institutions. And maybe that's why, as you noted, the MAGA types are so resentful and angry. They're sick of having this unnatural horseshit ideology dumped on them against their will.

Expand full comment

The people in Eastern Europe were also resentful and angry at the ruling commie minority for just this reason. There's always a danger it will itself become ponerogenic, but at least in the case of Eastern Europe, it didn't at the time.

Expand full comment

Anger and resentment are different things, anger is more immediate and resentment is also anger-based, but its older anger, that is nurtured over time, with the active participation of the holder of the emotion. Resentment has a bitterness to it, also. I think Tea Party people and MAGA people, if some of them have anything, its more anger, whereas for the woke, its resentment. Now, you CAN get resentment (victim mindset driven) on the Left and the Right (NAZI Germany), but here, its on the Left. Stacey Abrams even described it as her main driver, anger from her teenage years (I would speculate because she is unattractive and overweight and not that bright, was probably picked on a lot). You just don't see that many attractive successful people harboring resentment, they are too busy enjoying life and making contributions.

Expand full comment

This brilliant excerpt from Political Ponerology answers my prayers regarding why our victimizers redirect so much of the energy they parasitically extract from us into destroying our ways and mores, as noted by Emanuel Pastreich in this 15 second clip: https://video.thesetruths.com/Sflgt9b/we-have-a-systemic-effort-by-a-tiny-handful-of-the-extremely-rich/

I pray we identify and cast off the psychopaths while we retain strength to do so.

Expand full comment

Thanks HK. The tomatoes sum up the dysfunction of modern society & insane govturds exactly.

Expand full comment

Thank you for this. Excellent.

Expand full comment

This article caused something to finally click for me. Queers have a responsibility to normies that they're failing to live up to. It is as you say, normies can never become comfortable with what queers are naturally comfortable with. Since queers have the capacity to become comfortable with everything, do they not have a responsibility to normies to shield them from things they will always find repulsive and vile? I think they do. This is why pride month is such an affront against nature. Being forced to endorse things you will always regard with instinctive disgust is an affront to nature. Doing the forcing is vile and unkind. Queers often state that they are only interested in being treated with dignity and respect, but to enjoy such treatment normies will always need for you to act in a dignified manner and earn such respect. That is just how normal human beings are made.

Expand full comment

Spot on. So many of us really don't care what sexual proclivities or gender expressions people want to indulge in, but why is there this incessant demand that everyone witness the public spectacle of it and celebrate it? That's not the desire of a psychologically healthy human who just wants to live his own life without some moral busybody interfering (which is what the gay rights movement used to pretend to be fighting for), but the insane and insatiable demand of narcissists to be the center of everyone's attention, constantly, with nothing but shouts of adulation and approval ringing constantly in their ears (which is what today's rainbow-flag movement really represents).

Expand full comment

My own reaction to LGBT-QUERTY+ is similar.

Back in the day, when gays and lesbians were campaigning against such things as sodomy laws, I supported them. I am old enough to remember when homosexuals were "treated" with such horrors as electroshock therapy (now outlawed in many European countries!), lobotomies and chemical castration. I never want to see such barbarities repeated.

I balked (and still do!) at the idea of same-sex "marriage" because I consider that to be an Orwellian corruption of language. Marriage has always been understood as the establishment of a household for the purpose of raising the next generation (even if no issue results from a specific union). Also, as an Orthodox Christian, I regard marriage as a sacrament, and not a contract which we get to define as we wish, or which either party is at liberty to break at any time. So, I regard same-sex "marriage" as a semantic and conceptual fraud.

On the other hand, if two men or two women want to make formal legal domestic arrangements between themselves, I have no objection. Besides, what goes on behind closed doors and closed curtains between consenting adults (in Thomas Jefferson's words) "neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" and, as such, is none of my business.

However, as Daniel D says, this loud insistence that we "affirm" such lifestyles, and the shrill demands that we show ourselves as "allies" (what if I am just indifferent? ..) reeks of narcissism and Cluster-B.

Expand full comment

1000% agree. Very well said.

Expand full comment

Okay so Real Clear Politics wants to justify the military budget for Ukraine and institutional applications of DEI strains to keep a legal inversion going to (???) ...appease the hidden hand of China. RCP's Cannon cites Tucker Carlson as a type of communist symp for dissenting against sending illegal cluster munitions to Ukraine and deprecating the national stockpile for Zelensky, a guy who hates *actual* democracy. "BUT EVERYONE ELSE IS WITH US!! You're the only one complaining Carlson!!" Retail management logic at work for the merchant marines of the D.C. press. Read & interpret the action here: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/07/19/defense_survey_reveals_age_gender_party_divides_149502.html

Expand full comment

I just hope and pray we can get rid of our tyrant woke dictator Justin Trudeau by voting him out at our next election! He is one of the wokest graduates from the WEF Global Young Leaders program because Canada is feeling more and more like communist China every single day now and our prime minister has publicly gushed about how he admires the way the CCP quote “gets things done ” without any of the drawbacks of democracy requiring the people’s consensus!

This was an excellent article Harrison helping explain the mindset of the crazies. I note in every instance I’ve observed every single time when push comes to shove and they just can’t rationally argue their point anymore because it doesn’t MAKE SENSE they all get very hostile and then instantly dismissive of their combatant. Not a good look when you can’t reason your way out of a paper bag..

Expand full comment

Yes, Trudeau must geau!

Expand full comment

Great essay. I found parts hard to unpack, particularly the quoted sections. Here’s my attempt to summarize. Any key omissions or errors?

Natural order losers are, in fact, put out. Woke movement represents revolt against natural order. The average lefty dislikes inequality and is consequently sympathetic. The true believers live in an abstract space and completely disregard the potential objectivity of the natural order. They believe they can simply reprogram everyone to their alternative framing. But the natural order is based on reality, and so they’ll fail — yet can wreak real havoc while given the mic.

Expand full comment

I think that's a decent summary, Onos. Only omission I'd mention is that the natural order losers have personality disorders. They're constitutionally incapable of seeing the objectivity of the natural order.

Expand full comment

This whole woke thing has been difficult for me to fathom. I have very little psychology training (I think luckily) and have not even studied all the materials produced by my chosen teacher (Hubbard).

So I mostly see the clear omission on both sides, which is our spiritual legacy. The fact that we are immortal spiritual beings is not that important by itself. But the information about the human condition that has resulted from just a few researchers looking in that direction has led to a completely different viewpoint on life.

This has resulted in some new (for most of us) revelations regarding psychopathic personalities and their role in disrupting our lives and society in general. This demands changes in our approach to law and crime. Hubbard also developed some other approaches which together give the subject of what he calls Ethics a whole new face.

These discoveries have also resulted in a new understanding of human psychology and what to do about human problems and achieve "mental health."

But for subjects like the battle against Woke, or any political challenge, we have mostly only the broad patterns available to us to aid us in understanding. When an individual or group is going crazy, being violent or advocating policies that are destructive, they are obviously under the influence of one or more psychopaths. The key action to defuse the situation is to separate those people from the evil influence. I have been taught to do this (at a somewhat superficial level) by telling someone who is troubled to stop reading the newspaper (or watching the news) for a couple of weeks.

We see the primary mechanism at work as "key-in" or restimulation. The psychopaths have done something to throw people's attentions onto negative past experiences that then cause them to behave irrationally. Part of our spiritual counseling involves decreasing a person's susceptibility to being restimulated. This can even include better nutrition and training in various social skills or any skill the person might need to survive better.

The agonizing job of determining the "agendas' of the criminally insane seems relatively irrelevant given this overall pattern which gives this basic strategy: 1) Cut off the psychopaths from the people they are influencing; 2) Invite those people to discover the false data they were persuaded to believe; 3) Train them in the true data and invite them to make their own decisions.

But assuming we aren't really set up to do that, the best backup plan seems to be to expose the plans of the crazies as best we can. I think it's important, though, to not label people as hopeless too readily. The really crazy are mostly hopeless but all those who are merely under their influence can often be brought back into a more rational way of life.

I just finished watching "What is a Woman?" on Twitter. The problem of woke and other movements rooted in fantasy and an inability to confront life has grown very large in society today. And it's up to a relatively small group of people to turn things around. It is a daunting task. And we are hampered by our own difficulties of thought. I only hope enough people can be strengthened sufficiently to pull this off.

Expand full comment

Hey Henderson - did you like you own post?

Hanania - you as well?

I mean I think I see the face of the author there on the "likes"...

just inquiring.

I liked it as well already as ought be evident, but it is unbecoming Henderson and Hanania to like you own stuff....

~~~~

ok, ha, ha.....

I know when to hush....

Expand full comment

Henderson and Hanania are you sure about this?

and forevermore if I respond to a post of yours can I refer to you as "Henderson" and/or "Hanania"....or maybe did I take it out of context?

Expand full comment

I do not understand this comment, BK.

Expand full comment

In your subtitle you said as follows:

"Harrison (that's me) replies to Henderson and Hanania"

Now, if one was going to be all literal, I hope it makes sense, but context matters and I'm not all literal - I was just playing around some paraprosdokian semantics.

Expand full comment

Your sense of humor is way above my head. ;) But, to be literal, if you respond to me, you can refer to me as Harrison or Koehli. But if you want to go for alliteration, as I did with the 3 H's, it would be better to choose the latter: Ken responds to Koehli.

Expand full comment

Alliteration effort - here goes:

~~~~

Koehli kontemplated ken's krazy kerpunked klinking kalming konfusing kicking klassic karate upperkut incisions karried out with determination....

sense of humor and koncluded

"I do not understand."

Join the klub ken responded - best talking face-to-face- and bottom line is - it is good to laugh and healthy and necessary, but I care about semantics - semantics matter, semantiks are important - just like merit is. I think there ought be a single "exekutive", but the term is limited and the power as well - it has to be balanced.

With Respect,

BK

Expand full comment

OK.

ha, ha.

Without a sense of humor where would be....

Expand full comment

By the way do you know what paraprosdokian means?

For that matter - check this out if you have some time - it is funny...

Ken

https://buffaloken.substack.com/p/the-next-anagram-will-be

(especially the commentary...from P&S - good stuff...)

Expand full comment

I had to look it up. ;)

Expand full comment