Elon’s Chart of How the Left’s Gone Mad Sparks Culture War Debate

BUCK: There’s a really interesting debate that is underway right now between some of the voices in the media that think they know a lot about this stuff, because Elon Musk has said — and he’s putting out stuff on Twitter. He has said, first of all, that wokeness is “divisive, exclusionary, and hateful,” and he’s absolutely right. He has referred to the woke “mind virus,” and that is absolutely what it is.

And he has said also that the Democrat Party… And he shared some graphic, if you will, that showed this on Twitter, which is obviously a platform he’s very active on right now as he’s soon to be new owner of it. It showed that the left has basically gone insane, that the left is now taking policy positions and pushing for things that they would have said, “Never would we want that,” even maybe 10 or five years ago.

The left has radicalized. It’s radical used, in large part, because it had acquired the institutional power in polices like Twitter and Facebook, Silicon Valley, corporate America, Disney, Netflix — as well as the usual strongholds of the campuses and the journos in the news media — it had felt as though it had the power to finally push for things that would be unrecognizable to a Democrat Party of even 10 years ago.

And they’re starting to figure this out among Democrats. Some of them are just delusional and they’ll say, “That’s not true!” The right has moved further right.” You’ll see some people say this. “Look at this data that I pulled a bunch of data! Look I’ve got a magic algorithm that shows you that it’s the right wring that’s got…” Really? The right wing in an era of conservatives who are increasingly, I think, frustrated with just abandoning ground to the other side.

“Losing but losing slowly and gracefully.” That had been the GOP mantra for, well, much of the last 20 years until punch came along and said, “No, I think you push bullies back in the nose when they punch you first.” That was a big change. The left is now pushing for ideas that they would have agreed were extreme just a few years ago, even perhaps back in the Obama administration.

Although I would argue that this is just the next logical phase of Obamaism, if you will, that we’ve seen. They were establishing a beachhead for more of this, that slopes are in fact slippery. Don’t ever listen to somebody who says, “That’s a slippery slope argument!” Yes, and it’s probably true, as we have seen. There’s a… Gravity still works on a slope. That’s why it is slippery.

“Liberals Can’t Win a Culture War Without a Good Defense.” This is a piece by Jonathan Chait, which I thought was interesting. This caught my attention because here’s what the left has been saying about the formidable work of Chris Rufo, who just exposes what is really going on, he just shows what is really being taught to your kids.

He explains what diversity and inclusion and wokeness means in a corporate context, with proof, with video, with the teaching materials. And you know what the left keeps saying. “That’s not true. That’s not real.” They’re just in denialism about it. And that’s not gonna work. It’s not that they are upset with the dishonesty inherent in the denialism ’cause honestly the left has no principles to protect.

So it gives them a lot of leeway except they realize it’s politically disadvantageous now. There is a problem. There is a problem the Democrats are facing in this midterm, and that is people have seen how crazy the Democrat Party is. And the Democrats in places like Arizona and Nevada and Pennsylvania who want to tell you, “Oh, I’m just…

“I’m a gun-toting Democrat who’s moderate and all this sort of stuff.” Hmm, no. No, not gonna buy it. Not when your party is pushing for this stuff. So this has become a political threat to Democrats. Jonathan Chait in this piece says… Remember, he’s a leftist. This is a man of the left. But he’s writing about this because he recognizes that pretending it’s not there isn’t gonna make the problem go away.

“’Don’t dodge culture wars, win them,’ is a slogan that has begun circulating on the left,” he writes. “Jamelle Bouie makes a more considered version of the case in a recent column. Here’s how he begins: ‘Almost 60 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter described what he saw as the true goal of McCarthyism. “The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage,” he wrote, “or even to expose actual communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the communist issue itself.’

“I also find this precedent to be instructive, though I think the implications might lead in a somewhat different direction than many other culture-war enlisters would like to take it,” and he goes on to explain correctly that the left is in still, decades later, denial about the reality of communist penetration of the United States government, of the Democrat Party and the labor movement working closely with communists.

And I mean getting checks and orders from the Kremlin in the Soviet Union communists. The Democrats pretend this did not happen. It did happen. McCarthyism is not based on a fantasy. McCarthy was right about a lot, actually, and Democrats now think that they’re gonna be able to run the same playbook that they did on the so-called Red Scare. They just act like it wasn’t even there.

People will say, “Oh, it’s McCarthyism,” and you say, “Well, hold on a second. What do you mean by that? Because Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy and a senior adviser and member of the United States government, because there were communist penetrations.” If you want to read… Now, only one of them, Richard Wright — only one of them – was, I think, an American communist.

The God that Failed is a great compendium of essays written by former communists in the west in Europe and America saying that they realized that they were essentially part of a godless death cult of totalitarianism that was trying to destroy the whole planet. (laughs) They didn’t put it in those terms, but that’s basically what they were saying. The communist penetration was real. Why does this matter today?

Because what the left is trying to tell you is that they’re not pushing gender identity on children anywhere, they’re not teaching that white people need to apologize — even in a corporate context — for all the racism of the past and they should be ashamed and they should be… You know, being an ally means bending the knee and saying, “Yes, I’m ashamed my past and my history and who I am.”

They pretend that that’s not happening. That’s a lie, and people see it now, and that’s the problem. So it’s not that they weren’t comfortable telling the lies before. It’s that the lying no longer works for the Democrats. The left can’t get away with it anymore. And that’s why Ron DeSantis and others leaning into this, Chris Rufo doing fantastic work, exposing what is being taught to your kids.

Glenn Youngkin up in Virginia is great on the school issue and parental involvement. People realize. Show the American people what is actually happening right now, and they will see that the left is insane. And now I bring up this Chait piece, Jonathan Chait piece because he’s a leftist who is saying (summarized), “Hey, guys, we gotta fight on this issue because the ‘I don’t see this, it’s not real, they’re just lying about teaching 4-year-olds gender identity’ ain’t gonna fly.

“The cat’s out of the bag. People know. It’s there. The evidence is out there. Chris Rufo has a whole website with this stuff.” You just see it the diversity and inclusion training. Everybody that I know in corporate America has some story right now, all of my… When I say that “I know,” close friends of mine will tell me. “What were you allowed to say during the BLM riots when they would have these town hall meetings in different companies?

“Were you allowed to say, ‘This is reckless, it’s destructive, it’s stupid, it’s actually not about saving lives, it’s going to ruin lives’?” We’ve seen that is what actually happened. Were you allowed to say that in corporate meetings? Nno, of course you weren’t. Everyone knows that. You’d lose your job. Lose your job, a lot of places.

So they have to at least the address the reality of where the American people are on this, and that’s why where Ron DeSantis had the whole issue with Disney that came up, he knew. “Oh, yeah, Disney? You to go along with this lie that it’s the ‘don’t say gay’ bill? You want to go along with this pretense that no one wants to teach kids weird stuff when they’re 4 or 5-year-olds in school, no one wants to indoctrinate them?”

That’s what the left was trying, and DeSantis said, “No, let’s fight back. Let’s tell people the truth,” and so the left is on their heels. They’re playing defense on issues they thought they could get away with continuing to be on offense on. They’re not able to really make that psychological transition. What are they going to do? ‘Cause, as I said, there’s power at stake now.

The mission that they have to indoctrinate and to crush and silence the opposition, that is in jeopardy. So they have take into account what the real explanation is, what is the argument they’re going to make. They can’t just say, “We’re not teaching 4-year-olds that there are lots of different genders, and we’re not pushing kids who are 5 or 6 years old…”

And this is just one issue, right? But this is an important one. You’ve noticed the silence about the athletes, males competing against females in the NCAA from 90% of the left. They won’t criticize it. They’ll go along with it. They won’t criticize people who say, “Men can get pregnant.” They go along with it. Everyone sees this now.

So while it used to be feasible for them to just ignore, to downplay… Look at the game they play with CRT specifically. “There is no CRT in schools. There is no CRT!” That’s what they kept saying, and the only reason we knew about the CRT in the first place, the critical race theory, was because of parents who were at home who saw what was being taught to their kids because of Zoom instruction.

The teachers unions shut down the schools far longer than need to be ’cause Democrats take orders from the teachers unions, but that’s a whole other component of this. So parents were seeing what was being taught to their kids and then what did the national media tries to say? “That’s not being taught to your kids! Don’t believe your lying eyes.

“Don’t believe your lying ears.” This is what the Democrat Party line was. And then more information came out, more data came out, and that became untenable. So they said, “Well, you can’t understand what CRT is. You have to have a PhD to know.” Really? I don’t think so. I think we all understand that when you have kids line up and you have kids say:

“You are the oppressed and you are the oppressor.” Small children. No ability to reason through this. They’re just listening to the adults as we teach them to, we tell them to, parents say, listen to Mr. or Mrs. You know, so-and-so as your teacher and then the teachers are filling their minds with this nonsense. And then the left was trying to apprehend it wasn’t going on and now we see it obviously was.

And some Democrats are trying to — not out of principle but out of a desire for power, trying to — signal that there’s a problem here, trying to ring the alarm bell, hey, guys we gotta defends this stuff, we gotta say, “Okay. Maybe there are some people on the left who have taken it to this crazy extreme, but it’s not representative of the Democrat Party.”

Because the game they’re still trying to play right now is, “We don’t do that. No one says that! That’s not happening.” That’s not gonna work. We’ve exposed too much. We’ve seen too much. The truth is out there now. So we just have to stay on it. It’s one of the things we do here, I think, day in and day out.