A Righteous and Just Excoriation of “Woke Left” Anarchistic Nihilism

 

Bret Weinstein, the egregiously, horribly, railroaded former professor of biology at Evergreen State College, and a Bernie Sanders supporter, who spoke out against an action of de facto segregation promulgated by “woke” black student activists at Evergreen, has just spoken out on the British Unherd (https://unherd.com/2021/04/how-anarchists-captured-portland)  against the “woke” chaos now being perpetrated in his newly-adopted home city of Portland, Oregon, where he and his wife Heather, also ostracized from Evergreen, now reside—and criticizes the “woke” from a standpoint that can only be described as concerned, social-democratic left, not neoliberal right.

While he calls those promulgating violence, looting and harassment of ordinary citizens in Portland as “anarchists,” he’s not necessarily implying that they are political or philosophical anarchists; merely nihilists of the “woke left” who’ve latched onto the slogans promulgated by Black Lives Matter and concerns over the still-prevalent racism in US society to garner sympathy and support for what he calls only the ceding “by voices of reason on the Left to extremists who deliberately conflate a demand for racial justice with a desire to burn civilisation [British spelling, as Unherd is British—GF] to the ground” and ruefully, ironically, cries out, “Welcome to Portland; the progressive dream that has turned into a nightmare.” 

Weinstein is scathing throughout in his denunciation of these new nihilists:  he pointedly notes of this “movement’s” origins, “suddenly last summer, with the confluence of the George Floyd protests and the Presidential election, Portland came unmoored,” calls these activists, “a small but violent mob of misanthropes” perpetrating a “current wave of terror, and, due to the deliberate inaction against these mobs of “woke” by both Portland’s Mayor and police force, alleges directly, “anarchists have gained a strange kind of control over the city in their fight against Nazis and white supremacists they appear to have conjured in a quest to give their anger meaning.”  (However, Weinstein pointedly notes that, in progressive Portland, these supposedly everywhere hordes of Nazis and white supremacists are, in the famous words of Mark Twain commenting on his supposed death as published in a newspaper’s obituary, “greatly exaggerated.”)

But we of the “voices of reason on the Left” have dealt with this kind of pernicious nonsense before, famously in the case of Weatherman in the late 1960s, early 1970s, a group that, despite its florid adoption of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist rhetoric, were really, just as are the “woke” of Portland, “neo-anarchist terrorists” who only gave grist to the right-wing mill all too eager to silence those “voices of reason on the Left,” and who, under both Nixon and Reagan, succeeded masterfully, and shifted the country not to the left, but to the right (especially in Reagan’s case, to the far right, as this Great Communicator ran successfully for President twice on being against the New Left, and as a bulwark of safety against anarchy, terror, and Weatherman’s random bombings).  Thus, are there enemies of the Left clearly on the supposed left:  the “propaganda of the deed” denizens, the ultraleftists who have no idea of what is actually and actually not feasible, and the Blanquist small coteries of cadres who, by military-minded conspiracy, bring about “socialism by insurrectionary coup.”  [Blanquism is named after Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), a French revolutionary socialist who called for socialism to be achieved by small, armed groups leading insurrections.  The similarities between the “woke” of today and Blanqui’s small cadres provoking revolutionary violence are obvious—GF] Much the same happened to the Weinsteins at Evergreen State; but it no more ushered in the Olympia, Washington Commune [Olympia is the home of Evergreen State—GF] than it has the Portland Commune.  All it has done is cause fear among small business owners whether their businesses will be trashed by looting, as has happened to so many other Portland businesses; and ushered in anger among ordinary working people, who are awakened from sleep by chanting mobs demanding, “Wake up, motherfuckers, wake up!”  Thus, do ill-conceived tactics, and a general sense of nihilism masquerading as activism directly undermine the cause of the left, not enhance it—and make meaningful and extensive social change that much more difficult to achieve and attain.