- Plebity - Page 3

Anti-Oppression Politics is a Red Herring to Divert Our Attention from Empire, Inequality, and Class Solidarity

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Why are the rich so much better at uniting around class issues than the plebes? Outrage is a sentiment that feels so pure and so right. When it is pointed at injustice and burns bright inside of us we are reaffirmed as the moral beings that we believe ourselves to be. That our strongly held sense of righteousness could be a useful tool for others and even redirected to serve their purposes may seem impossible and even unbearable.

Mark White | Jul 6, 2021

Hey English Instructors – ‘Take a History Class and Learn about Free Speech’

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Recently, Oklahoma University contributed their own stark example of how the core values of free speech and critical thinking are being misunderstood and misapplied in the spheres of what we call ‘higher education’.

Mark White | Jun 27, 2021

Hyperbole on the Loose! The Left Cries Wolf and is Unprepared to Recognize the Real Thing

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When you’ve branded every dissenting voice–no matter how mild, with the harshest possible labels, what vocabulary do you have available to point out the actual wolf when it comes out of the forest?

Mark White | Jun 25, 2021

A Leftist Scholar on Populism Abandons Foundational Principles of Free Speech and Class

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If anyone is wondering just how deep is the left’s abandonment of its most long-standing and foundational values, namely free speech and class analysis, one need look no further than this book about populism: Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic by Columbia Law School postdoc scholar Camila Vergara.

Mark White | Jun 15, 2021

Populism: The New Red Scare

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Populism does indeed have a set of prevailing principles that characterizes it. These principles cut across all political cloths, often garnering support from left- and right-wing proponents. Some of the basic principles include: circumventing power from Wall Street, ending corporate welfare and crony capitalism, ending mass surveillance programs, ending military interventionism and occupation, and opposing corporate trade agreements.

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These principles don’t describe just one political identity, and that is why they tend to attract a broad following of people from all political persuasions.

Mark White | May 31, 2021

When Populism Meant Collective Strength Against a Rigged System

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The word populism gets thrown around these days to mean many different things. But the populist farmers revolt of the 1880s has so much to teach us today.

Mark White | May 25, 2021

How the Left Woke Up and Found Its Inner Anti-Semitism

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The mildest of criticisms aimed at woke theology are considered literal violence by its proponents. But at the same time, the harshest slurs and insults are completely acceptable if they are deployed against individuals who are not part of what has become a protected caste. In fact, randomly tossing around words like bigot, Nazi or White supremacist is the woke sport of our age. Nazi no longer means members of the National Socialist Party of Germany in the 30s and 40s who were dedicated, above all else, to the extermination of other humans born into one particular group. For woke cultists, Nazi just means anyone who doesn’t adhere to the exact language of their catechism. It’s strange that it is necessary to say, in our modern woke world of supposed tolerance for everyone’s identity, that Jewish identity and the enduring nature of anti-Semitism are real.

Mark White | May 9, 2021

How about a coup against Silicon Valley?

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A decade ago for a brief moment following the 2008 global economic crash, there was a world-wide wave of angry emotion when the unbridled greed of the dominant capitalist elite was suddenly laid bare. Here in the US this engendered a movement called Occupy, which started in Zuccotti Park in the New York City financial district and spread quickly throughout the country.

Occupy, with all its imperfections, was widely viewed as a genuine populist movement. The movement focused on issues of economic inequality and coined the phrase ‘we are the 99%.’ Chris Hedges said at the time in an article on Truthdig that “Occupy articulated the concerns of the majority of citizens.”

Occupy set off a powerful emotional surge that swept across the country and genuinely frightened the elite. The State moved quickly to ensure that Occupy was effectively quashed. Under Obama, the federal government and local police forces joined to dismantle, often brutally, Occupy encampments across the country. No effort was spared in terms of mass arrests, surveillance, and other forms of State powered repression to ensure that Occupy couldn't metastasize into anything lasting or inspire any actual challenges to power.

Mark White | Jan 11, 2021

Karl Popper, Free Speech and the Paradox of Tolerance

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Cancel culture is the horror movie that has people transfixed by their computer screens, lost in the make believe exchanges of social media when suddenly, all too real, a monster steps out of the screen and into the lives of actual people, seeking their destruction and reveling in their pain and loss.

Mark White | Dec 13, 2020

Articles by Mark White