"The Mainstream"

“…as you said, this is still being pushed in schools very aggressively, there’s a lot of gender confusion out there among young children, and I don’t see our reliance on experts going away…”

This was Abigail Shrier describing to Benjamin Boyce the situation now throughout America (and the wider West in varying degrees) of a systemic institutionalization of gender madness against parents and children. While it’s an apt description in and of itself, it seems couched in a curious myopia to the wider problem of how and why these things are happening so broadly and intensively. It almost sounds, when Abigail is talking (and Benjamin does little to correct her), that there are these bad people doing these things to us, and we are more or less powerless for now to push back, but maybe we can find a way, etc. — rather than that the problem is not so much people within institutions, but the systemic culture that is the wider contextual web of cultural tissue unifying those institutions and creating (and promoting) these policies by a kind of auto-pilot mechanism of feedback loops.

That myopia will remain occluded as long as it doesn’t fully grasp the ostensible fact that Leftism has successfully pulled off a “palace revolution” to take over the Mainstream. When exactly this comprehensive coup took place — during the Trump years; in the 90s with the Clinton Era; in the 60s and its cultural aftermath — may be a matter of debate. That it has occurred and we now live under its rule, however, seems beyond argument.

When I have tried to point this out to others, I notice a thin filmy gauze of incomprehension pass over their eyes; and it has occurred to me that perhaps the nodus of the communication problem here is in the definition of “the Mainstream”.

So what is this “Mainstream”, anyway? We’ll get to that (hopefully) more directly in our third installment. For now, let’s examine a couple of other examples of misapprehension.

Another example of apparently anti-Left critics (hard to tell, because they tend to couch it as being anti-”woke” as though that’s different from Leftism somehow) can be gleaned from this exchange between Benjamin Boyce and Keri Smith (beginning about 31:30). At that juncture, they are talking about how humor will help accelerate the changing (and eventual elimination) of the fashion of wokeness:

Keri Smith: “…because finding the humor in things… and making fun of the 'amen / awoman" thing instead of getting angry about it, finding the humor in it -- because it is funny -- I think that culturally, if large numbers of people start doing that, then you will see a shift culturally where -- you know, there's always trends in what's cool, what's not cool... laughing at that stuff [and having more and more comedians lampoon it] instead of being outraged about it, if that becomes dominant enough, or becomes, you know, mainstream enough, then the culture will shift. People will start to find wokeness as uncool...

Benjamin Boyce: It will be the 'bellbottoms'. In 10 years, it will be so disgusting, people will just ridicule it, like 80s big hair, 90s big hair, bellbottoms -- there's going to be a big, not just a backlash politically, but like a hangover..."

Keri Smith: Yes! A cultural hangover, like "I can't believe that was ever a thing!" And people will deny having been a part of it, or like they'll pretend they were always one of the critics!

[END QUOTE]

Again, one gets the distinct sense from the way Smith and Boyce describe the problem, that this “wokeness” is only occurring within the wider Mainstream, and all these woke people swimming around within the Mainstream also jostle with non-woke people, swimming by them, around them, under them, occasionally (or it may seem often) bumping into them, getting into confrontational tangles perhaps, etc. But to them, apparently, the Mainstream itself is just this amorphous, hollow shell — a container, a warehouse, a neutral arena in which woke and non-woke critique and clash. It doesn’t seem to occur to Boyce and Smith that the arena itself — the Mainstream itself — is Leftist (or “woke”). If that is the case, then the situation is much more complicated and difficult than just a matter of the rosy optimism of “when enough people start making fun of wokeness then the culture will shift”. For one thing, if the Mainstream itself is Leftist, the two sides — woke and unwoke — would then not be on a level playing field, but the woke would have an enormous advantage, since the entire Mainstream around us would be affirming, supporting and promoting them, while punishing the unwoke (and/or the anti-woke).

A third example comes from James Lindsay, who currently seems to be a rising star on a sort of Jordan-Petersonian trajectory. Describing for his host Sebastian Gorka how the scam he pulled off with his two colleagues (Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose) was widely reported initially but only briefly, he concludes:

“We were hoping that it would reveal the scandal within the Academic system; and the Academic system decided to pretend that nothing happened.”

Lindsay here seems to be assuming that the problem of denial and effective cover-up of this embarrassing situation pertained only to the Academic system, as though that sector is not deeply and broadly enmeshed in the wider Mainstream. One wonders if Lindsay has considered that the entire Mainstream is deformed by the same irrational tissue of disease of which the experiment he and his colleagues performed uncovered one glaring glimpse. Probably not. He probably shares the same reflexive, unexamined assumption most people have: namely, that the Mainstream is a neutral framework in which problematic behaviors like that Academic one occur.

In my third installment, hopefully I’ll get into the actual meat of the question: what precisely is “the Mainstream”?