"You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows"

This is the way J.D. Vance, and Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton, and the rest of the Next Generation Trumpers are going to pitch us Trumpism without the crazy.

Well, without most of the crazy, anyhow. https://t.co/ThBSANAKfF

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 4, 2021

I get to this speech via Charlie Pierce, but what bothers me about it is not the fascism, it's the racism.  Because the three scare words here are "woke," "BLM," and "critical race theory."  J.D. Vance has no idea what any of them mean, but that doesn't matter:  it's all about the Black Panther carrying a gun openly on the streets.

That, by the way, is an historical reference. I explain that for the youngsters in the audience.

Let's start with praising the mythical America that existed before blacks tried to get us "woke":

I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own, to raise a family in dignity on a single middle-class job. It’s a simple vision: If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to live a good life in this country that is your own, that was built by your parents and grandparents, that will be inherited by your children.

What's keeping us from having that?  Big Money.  Foundations and industry and capitalism.  "Woke" capitalism.  If you're old enough to hear echoes of the '60's challenge to "the Establishment," you're hearing right. JD Vance, venture capitalist and best-selling author, and way too young to know anything about the '60's except from books or bad Aaron Sorkin movies, is the man to criticize the Establishment.  Remember a tongue-in-cheek ad of a decade or so back, where a white-haired man in a big corner office tells his minion that what he's doing (using the advertised product/service) is his "way of sticking it to the Man"?  To which his bewildered minion responds, "But sir, you are 'the Man'."  JD Vance is "the Man."  But he's stickin' it to the Man.  Because like Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz, he's enjoyed all the benefits being white in America can bestow.  And now, like Donald Trump, he sells himself as a "blue-collar" guy, who can stick it to "the Man."  And how does he do it?  In the great American tradition:  shameless racism.

Blacks were always going to take something away from whites.  Since Reconstruction, that's how rich whites kept poor blacks and poor whites, who had more in common with each other than with the rich people, down.  They told the poor whites the blacks were going to take everything from them:  their women, their money, their place (such as it was); everything.  The only pride a poor white had was that he wasn't a "ni--er."  Keeping that resentment alive was neither accidental nor unintentional.

JD Vance hasn't invented a damned thing. He's working an old, old vein of pure resentment gold, that has yet to run out of supply.

That’s why we worry so much about censorship, whether it comes from the government or whether it comes from the big corporations. I think it requires that we live and have work that has dignity and is meaningful. 

That's what people used to praise blacks for:  any sign of dignity.  It wasn't a compliment; it was a foot in the face.  Lack of dignity was what most blacks were said to have.  They were not worthy of being equal to whites, economically, socially, under the law; not in any way at all, because as a race they lacked "dignity."  You may read this speech and think JD Vance is a nice guy.  I hear a white supremacist telling the "ni--ers" to "mind their place."  Because they ain't doing that, says young Mr. Vance:

Now, I happen to believe that the biggest obstacle to accomplishing this vision is woke capital, which of course is the topic of conversation today. And I believe that those of us on the right need to wake up to what’s really going on, because in practice, we have lost—and I hate to sound cynical, thoughI think I’m just being realistic—nearly every institution in this country that actually matters. We have lost the academy, we have lost the media, we have now lost the government, and we have lost the business and financial institutions too.

"Woke capital" means the blacks are in charge, and that's not the way the system is supposed to work.  It means everything is topsy-turvy, and the only way to set things right is to put blacks back in their place.  It means, as he explicitly says, that "we" (white people) have lost control to "them" (black people).  And the fools running the foundations and the industries and the major institutions of the economy, are blind to how they've been duped by "wokeness," which comes, of course, from blacks.  He's quite explicit about it:

Woke capital is when companies and businesses are more invested in a movement like BLM than they are in traditional American principles, and they are. And if you peel back the onion, what you find is that the businesses that are most connected and most devoted to destroying our values are also benefitting financially from it.

Get that?  It's not a dog whistle, it's a bullhorn.  "Traditional American principles" are white.  BLM is black.  BLM should not be in charge, because only white people should be in charge. BLM is destroying American values because BLM is putting Blacks in charge.

You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows. 

Still not explicit enough for you?

Now who was one of the biggest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement? The insurance companies. They refused to pay their own clients’ claims for their damaged property while at the same time they were making that damage more likely by funding the movement that was causing it.

The best example, of course, is Jeff Bezos, one of the largest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement, to the tune of millions of dollars. Now who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed? Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people so they get it delivered in the Amazon box? Jeff Bezos. There is a direct connection between woke capital and the plunder that’s happening in our society today. The people who are invested in destroying America via our corporate class are also getting rich from it. This is an important piece of the puzzle to understand.

And the problem is technology, and the problem is China; or rather, the Chinese over good, traditional values Americans:

The first is the rise of the digital over the hands-on economy. If you look at the companies that are most woke, that are most aggressively anti-American and anti-conservative, they are the companies that operate in the digital realm. If you’re manufacturing something, if you depend on cheap energy, if you’re building something with your hands, or employing those who do for shipping goods from one part of the country to another, you are fundamentally less woke than the digital technology oligarchy that’s trying to destroy the country. You see this consistently. Now sometimes of course, those companies can be woke too, and sometimes there’s some digital technology entrepreneurs who are not woke. But by and large, the digitalization of the American economy is one of the biggest drivers of the “wakening” of the American corporate class.

I'll get to China in a minute, but if you are a computer programmer or designer or do anything with technology, you are weak and corruptible and too easily led astray and will be "woke" before you know it.  This is "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"/commie symps stuff from the 1950's and '60's.  Everything old is new again.  Please to note Mr. Vance doesn't build anything with his hands; but he's escaped being "woke" just the same.  How is not specified.

A second factor is the rise of globalization. So the companies that are most invested in the American nation-state, in the people who live here, in the laborers who build and make our goods, those people tend to be far less woke than the people who are employing people overseas, who are more committed to overseas regimes.

Wokeness comes from associating too much with the “other,” with non-Americans. Not hard to draw that line back to non-white Americans. But right on cue, back from their last appearance in the 1960’s, comes the yellow horde:

I’ve heard of a banker who was asked by a union leader, “Don’t you worry about all the projects that you’re funding that are causing the destruction of American jobs? You’re shipping jobs overseas, funding the Chinese regime, making it easier for the Chinese middle class to rise and harder for the middle class in your own country.” And the banker’s response was telling, and I think we should take it to heart. He said, “I have international shareholders. I have international customers. I have international investors and I have international clients. I am not an American company. Why do I care about America more than anyone else?”

That attitude is driving a lot of the woke corporate class. Because when you’re invested in American workers, when you depend on American customers, when American consumers have more power over you than the Chinese regime, if your laborers are people in my hometown, Middletown, Ohio, and not Chinese slaves in China, than you are fundamentally more attached to the American nation-state, you can’t criticize it in the same way, and you face different incentives. 

See?  "Woke" and duped by the Yellow peril, to boot. And this speech can't end without dragging in Critical Race Theory, the third leg of the perilous triad that threatens the foundations of American Life As We White People Know It.

Finally, the allocators of capital themselves are going woke. Across our country we have non-profits, big foundations that are effectively social justice hedge funds. The Ford Foundation has $14 billion in assets under management. Their leadership is serving on many of our corporate boards, and of course the corporate boards of some of our biggest companies are serving as the leadership of the Ford Foundation. They’re investing in are Critical Race Theory, they’re investing in the racial division all across our country, and they’re invested in all of the progressive social causes of the moment. They are one of the biggest investors in the Black Lives Matter movement that destroyed many of our towns and cities last summer.

I guarantee JD Vance couldn't give a credible definition of Critical Race Theory if you gave him three books on the subject and let him have a month to work on the answer.  And which towns and cities were destroyed by BLM in 2020?  I'll take as comprehensive a list as he can provide, with citations to sources and pictures, if available.  And, of course, if you're teaching about sex. you're teaching children to have sex (because nobody in human history ever figured it out on their own!).  Same with racism:  if you're teaching about it, you can only be teaching it, because we eliminated racism in America in 1865.  Or was it 1967?  Anyway. Dr. King had a dream, and everything's been fine since then, right?

If you’re spending all your money to teach racism to our children in their schools, why do we give you special tax breaks instead of taxing you more?  

Once more, the racism, clear as a ringing bell:

The people of this country, whether they know it or not, depend on the institutions of the conservative movement to accomplish their objectives, to serve their interests, to make this country the sort of place where a good guy, working hard and playing by the rules, can raise his family as he sees fit on a single middle-class wage.

No one has been able to raise a family on a single middle-class wage for almost a generation before JD Vance was born.  Is he saying that situation occurred because of the "woke" '60's?  The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, everything since then?  Because it sure as hell sounds like it.

But that's not all of the '60's callbacks, folks.  To echo a popular phrase from the '60's which Mr. Vance clearly never heard or he'd have simplified this paragraph to a bumper sticker:  "America! Love It Or Leave It!"

I don’t mean this to be exhaustive, I can’t possibly sketch out everything we have to do on the question of woke capital, but I think there are some obvious solutions, and it should start from a fundamental premise that if you are fighting the American nation state, if you are fighting the values and virtues that make this country great, the conservative movement should be about nothing if not reducing your power, and if necessary, destroying you.

If you're not with Mr. Vance, you hate America.  Why do you hate America? It’s obviously because you’re a Commie sumo; or worse, a Commie. One has to be contained; the other simply has to be destroyed. It’s the only way to contain the threat.

History doesn't repeat itself, and it doesn't rhyme.  Time is just a flat circle.