News bits: The authoritarian radical right silences even Sir David Attenborough; What the radical right wants for America

Evidence of severe damage the damage that radical and hyper-radical politics and cancel culture is inflicting on inconvenient truth, free speech and secularism continues to accumulate. This is not just about America. It is about the human condition. This one really, really pisses me off. The Guardian writes:

BBC will not broadcast Attenborough episode over 

fear of ‘rightwing backlash’

The BBC has decided not to broadcast an episode of Sir David Attenborough’s flagship new series on British wildlife because of fears its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a backlash from Tory politicians and the rightwing press, the Guardian has been told.

The decision has angered the program-makers and some insiders at the BBC, who fear the corporation has bowed to pressure from lobbying groups with “dinosaurian ways”.

The BBC strongly denied this was the case and insisted the episode in question was never intended for broadcast.

The radical and hyper-radical right In America and everywhere else silences as much inconvenient truth as possible whenever possible by any means possible. I don’t believe the BBC’s bullshit excuse it was never intended for broadcast. If it was was never intended for broadcast, then why was it made? 

We all know exactly what this is about. The forces of evil tyranny and lies are defeating the forces of democracy and truth one at a time. The BBC has fallen.

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A NYT opinion by Michelle Goldberg lays out the plan. The takeover over the US Supreme Court by the radical right was just the start of its massive social engineering plan for America. Goldberg’s information is based on investigative reporting and research by ProPubica and Documented. She writes:

Leonard Leo, a leader of the right-wing Federalist Society, an extraordinarily effective legal organization, is broadening his ambitions. Leo is hoping to transform American culture the way he transformed the judiciary. In the words of an investigative report produced by ProPublica and Documented, he aims to build a sort of “Federalist Society for everything,” devoted to helping reactionaries consolidate power in realms like Wall Street, Silicon Valley, journalism, Hollywood and academia.

“I spent close to 30 years, if not more, helping to build the conservative legal movement,” Leo said in a video for the organization at the heart of his strategy, the Teneo Network. “And at some point or another, I just said to myself, ‘If this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’” That includes “wokeism in the corporate environment, in the educational environment,” biased media and “entertainment that is really corrupting our youth.”

Given Leo’s past success, he should be taken seriously. As Donald Trump’s adviser on judicial nominations, he helped put Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom have close Federalist Society ties, on the Supreme Court, making him central to the demise of Roe v. Wade. Leo has access to enormous resources; last year a conservative financier donated around $1.6 billion to a dark-money group that he controls. And since many elites resent the congeries of behavioral norms and linguistic innovations denigrated as wokeness, the Teneo Network will start from a place of strength, pushing on an open door.

After all, the nearly 50-year project of ending Roe is complete. Stirring crusades against Communism and then against radical Islam have subsided. The cult of personality around Trump has splintered. Many on the right would still like to obliterate the welfare state, but they’re deeply defensive about it. Hatred of wokeness is a brittle foundation for political identity, but it’s almost all that’s left.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, declared during his January inaugural address that “Florida is where woke goes to die.” Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state and a possible presidential candidate, recently tweeted, “Our internal threats — especially those trying to corrupt our kids with toxic wokeness — are more serious than our external threats.” Last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said, “Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic.”

Goldberg goes on to argue that wokeness is too weak a glue to hold together a radical political movement that would do to America generally what the radical theocrats did to Roe v. Wade. I very much doubt that. I think Goldberg is wrong. As far as I can tell, all the necessary cognitive biology and social behavior elements are there for the radical rage against abortion social and political movement to morph into just as much or even more rage against wokeness. To me, the emotional, social and intuitive factors for deranged abortion hate look to be about the same as they are for deranged woke hate. I think Leo has found a plausible cognitive-social pathway to kill democracy, civil liberties, the rule of law, secularism, pluralism and inconvenient truth. Of course, that is just my opinion, but it is a firm opinion. 

So, what is the identity politics and policies of wokeness? Radical, aggressive authoritarian-theocratic intrusion into people's lives like this:

•  Three Texas women are sued for wrongful death after allegedly helping friend obtain abortion medication. In the first lawsuit of its kind since Roe v. Wade was overturned, a husband seeks damages from women who allegedly helped his ex-wife obtain the medications to terminate her pregnancy.

A focus on demolishing American democracy like Viktor Orban did to Hungarian democracy:

• Florida Could Start Looking a Lot Like Hungary. The bill, of course, is only one part of DeSantis’s culture war. His administration has already limited what can be taught to K-12 students about race, sex and gender. “DeSantis seems to be putting into practice some of the political lessons Orban has to teach the American Right,” Rod Dreher, an American conservative living in Budapest, recently wrote with admiration.

Vicious mendacity, slander and bigotry like this (from Goldberg’s NYT opinion):

• A 2020 video that ProPublica and Documented found, in which the Teneo Network’s co-founder Evan Baehr described how he believed the left operates. He asked his audience to imagine a luncheon at the Harvard Club featuring a billionaire hedge funder, a movie producer, a Harvard professor and a writer for The New York Times. “The billionaire says, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if middle school kids had free access to sex-change therapy paid for by the federal government?’” Baehr said. “Well, the filmmaker says, ‘I’d love to do a documentary on that; it will be a major motion film.’ The Harvard professor says, ‘We can do studies on that to say that’s absolutely biologically sound and safe.’ And the New York Times person says, ‘I’ll profile people who feel trapped in the wrong gender.’”

• Laws are being passed all over the country targeting trans people, particularly trans kids, and the right’s language has turned openly eliminationist. (One speaker at CPAC said, “Transgenderism must be eradicated.”)

What the radical right has in store for us is a terrifying, morally rotted, dystopian tyranny-Christian theocracy. The radical right monster will be built mostly (~97% ?) on lies, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation, vilification of allegedly evil minorities (especially non-heterosexuals), and plenty of deranged crackpottery replete with blue space lasers, microchips in vaccines, and bigoted and racist false crackpot narratives. 

By now if one does not sense and oppose the grave danger the radical right poses to democracy and civil liberties, then one (i) denies or downplays it, (ii) mostly does not care, or (iii) implicitly or openly supports it. If there are significant states of mind other than denial, apathy or support, it’s not clear to me what they are, e.g., vincible ignorance.

Vincible ignorance -- a 4th state of mind?