Famed for being a crypto-realist who lives in a world of imagination, Glenn Danzig laid out the brutal truth about political correctness:
“People don’t understand, because everything’s so cancel-culture, woke bullshit nowadays, but you could never have the punk explosion nowadays, because of cancel culture and woke bullshit,” he continued.
“You could never have it. It would never have happened. We’re lucky it happened when it did, because it’ll never happen again. You won’t have any of those kinds of bands ever again. Everyone’s so uptight and P.C., it’s just like, ‘Okay, whatever.’”
People are slow and stupid creatures, so they do not realize that political correctness is forced speech. The twist that fools them is that instead of mandating that you say something in particular, political correctness removes your ability to say anything else.
It does this by redefining the debate along the lines of its goals and prohibiting anything else. For example, if Leftists say that they are against “racism” — apparently, this word means the ability for majority groups to survive diversity — then you are sorted in a binary fashion into “anti-racist” or “pro-racist,” with no room for any other argument.
This serves as a form of kafkatrapping:
One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.”
The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others.
The kafkatrap here consists of demonizing certain ideas to the point that anything but opposition to these things is viewed as affirmation of them. Someone who says, “I don’t want to join the Klan or Antifa, but I see that throughout history diversity has done nothing but destroy civilizations,” simply has no voice in the debate.
That in turn serves to make music a puppet for politics, as we see in punk after the Misfits: the only issues which may be discussed are “progressive” issues, and they can only be lauded, which means that anything deviating from this orthodoxy, even innocently, becomes The Enemy.
No wonder punk has produced so little of value in the past thirty-five years.
Tags: glenn danzig, kafkatrapping, political correctness, punk, sjws, the misfits, woke politics
Glenn knows
Kafkatrapping is a key element of the trendy Robin DeAngelo anti-racism grift, whereby she accuses workshop attendees of white privilege/supremacy, and any attempt they make of defending themselves is framed as evidence of their white privilege/supremacy. This is likely to become endemic in Western workplaces and academia before long, with businesses paying for the ‘privilege’.
As for Danzig, he’ll probably be deemed too old/white/male/past-his-prime to have any influence on the cultural zeitgeist. This kind of argument needs to be targeted precisely at the kind of groups who get bands de-platformed and dropped from labels because they stepped slightly outside the Overton window. Generalized complaining about “cancel culture” achieves nothing, and gets one dismissed as a disgruntled boomer by those doing the cancelling.
Here’s some learning: those doing the canceling do not give a damn about reality, especially good arguments against what they are doing. They are Dunning-Kruger proles and comprised of society’s outcast misfits — criminals, neurotics, transgenders, minorities, boxwines, soyboys, sociopaths, psychopaths, bureaucrats, and lawyers — who seek only power and have no idea what to do with it or how to wield it. The sword in the stone is power itself, but humanity finds time and again that it is in the wrong hands only when tragedy strikes. We can communicate nothing to the cancel culture people, only throw them out of helicopters (or, as I argue, exile them to Venezuela).
“Boomer”-lol
when did this term become a “thing”-who started the current misuse of it?
Leftist/marxist kids use it, and they don’t quite get that it’s the boomers that are their ideological forefathers.
It’s not “grumpy old white men”-like “Archie Bunker”—that generation has past. They are in their late 90’s or are dead.
Boomers are Bill and Hillary. They are bra burners and Kent State students. They are the origins of Greene Peace.
They are the Black Panthers. They are the Symbionese Liberation Army
The current left owes Boomers their whole platform-everything from Communism to Race Baiting-it began from the “Boomers”.
Anyone who refers to any form of conservatism as “Boomer”…
is a complete moron and has no grasp of history.
(Not saying that what the point of Bereft’s comment was-just wanted to rant about this)
We called them Baby Boomers back in the 1980s. It has been an accepted term since the late 1940s as far as I can tell.
Boomers come in several varieties, but most of them seem to be Leftist. That is, even the conservatives think that equality, diversity, the NWO, etc. are good things.
The others were hippies, but most of those grew up into BoBos (bohemian bourgeois). Most of those lean Left, except when it comes to their taxes or costs, at which point they are Libertarians.
The Black Panthers strike me as a reasonable response to diversity. No one wants to be a minority group ruled by an ethnic Other majority.
The Boomer “conservatism” is William F. Buckley styled “new right” conservatism, which reduces conservatism to “Christian Libertarianism” in order to back away from the John Birch Society views on promiscuity, homosexuality, and diversity being mucho sucko. Trump has tried to make conservatism into “Christian Nationalist Libertarianism,” which is an improvement but it’s time to drop Judeo-Christianity.
That’s probably the nicest thing anyone ever said about Danzig.