2015: The Year Things Got Weird
The following passage is excerpted from a longer piece I am currently writing, in which I trace the genesis of wokeness/political correctness to the year 1990, the same year which saw the fall of Soviet Communism, ushering in what writer Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history.”
It is my thesis that the start of the plague of ‘PC’ and the end of the Cold War are concomitant events, with a causal connection.
Somewhere around 2015, it seems, the PC/SJW/woke forces felt moved to begin an altogether more aggressive push of much more radical notions than they had ever promoted before.
I distinctly remember standing in line to make a purchase at a large chain bookseller at some point that year, and seeing that the front cover of a book prominently on display at the checkout desk bore the title The Transgender Child.
I was dumbfounded. The store’s obvious promotion of this, of all books, struck me as plainly surreal. I didn’t pick it up or read any of its contents because I quite frankly didn’t want, or need to know anything more. Seeing the title and the picture on the cover was enough to know exactly what the book was advocating, and exactly how I felt about it.
This was the same time period that we began to catch wind of how an increasing number of Hollywood celebrities and other famous and/or “important” people were dressing their boys up as girls, and dressing their girls up like boys. There were PSAs being launched, telling parents to be on the lookout for signs that their toddler or small child might be gender dysphoric. If your little girl liked to play with trains instead of dolls, that meant she was probably actually a boy! If your boy couldn’t be dissuaded from sitting down to pee, he was probably actually a girl!
Parents were advised by the authoritative “experts” in these PSAs to get their kids on hormone treatment immediately.
During this era, at least one actor/comedian, Owen Benjamin, who strongly took issue with the notion of administering hormone blockers and genital mutilation surgery to small children, and for his principled and eminently sane stance, was blacklisted by Hollywood and treated like a reprobate.
Black, it seemed, was white, and white was black. Fair was foul and foul was fair. A sure sign that witchcraft of some sort was afoot.
For my part, I was shocked that they, the pushers of these and other dubious moral novelties and ethical “innovations,” were being so bold and brazen as to make what could only be called an assault on children the centerpiece of their campaign.
The more prudent way to run the transgender op would be to start by issuing far less controversial diktats. Why not focus on the ostensible necessity to see to it that fully grown adults who feel they are in the “wrongly” gendered body get the “gender-affirming care” that they require before going anywhere near the supposed “trans child” issue? It was akin to a bullfighter foolishly immediately running in for the kill before even attempting to weaken his prey with less direct blows. It struck me as a bad strategy; then again, did they know something that I didn’t?
Perhaps there was an awareness that their time was running out?
***
Now, as then, the vast majority of the population are still thoroughly against child-transing, and feel likewise about transgender women (that is, men who feel that they are women in spite of their bodies revealing otherwise) playing women’s sports. Although many have gotten into the act of adopting “pronouns,” which may or may not correspond to the reality of their God-given anatomies, along with an increasing number of so-called non-binaries, who insist on being called “they/them” (when in fact “it” would be more appropriate), the transgender normalization crusade only has any juice at all because it has been aggressively thrust upon the public, not in response to any public demand.
Again, these facts help to demonstrate that the entire “woke” crusade as a whole is largely an astroturfed affair. (That doesn’t make it less pernicious; it simply clarifies that its influence is due primarily to it being imposed from above.)
***
It was also in 2015 that we began to see a heavy-handed push for pedophilia acceptance.
A popular internet site, Salon.com hosted an article by a “non-offending pedophile” who declared that it was wrong that society should discriminate against him— and others like him—just because of his orientation. (The article is no longer available to read on Salon, but has been republished elsewhere.)
This argument made by this pedo-sympathetic piece was afterwards amplified by several other sites, among them Vice and Cosmopolitan, in spite of the significant backlash that the article elicited, even from many ordinarily liberal or far-left leaning readers of Salon.
A new, less stigmatizing phrase, MAP (minor-attracted person), was suggested to replace the needlessly ugly sounding term “pedophile.” Support groups for MAPs started to crop up online. The emphasis wasn’t on trying to rehabilitate these people of their sick and vile lusts, but rather to affirm their inclinations, which were regarded as a central aspect of their being— much like it is said to be with others occupying space in the LGBT-spectrum.
If one examined the rhetoric favored by these support groups just a bit closer, one could discern that they didn’t just wish to destigmatize “non-offending” MAPs (that is, pedophiles); the ultimate goal was to construct a society in which “intergenerational” sex (that is, sexual contact between adults and minors; that is, child molestation) was likewise destigmatized.
Here, as with the child-transing push, there followed immediate and vociferous backlash, and not just from self-identified conservatives, but many moderates and even some liberals. Undaunted, the opinion-shapers promptly originated a bold new pastime: “drag queen story hour.”
Begun in San Francisco, then spreading to Brooklyn and finally expanding into numerous public libraries in “flyover country” of Middle America, this bizarre and grotesque practice featured burlesque transvestites flamboyantly reading children’s books about tolerance and acceptance to hapless little tykes.
Drag shows have a long and storied history, but before 2015 drag was widely regarded as adult-oriented entertainment.
Now, in an entirely unsubtle way that turned the stomachs of many, these drag performers, whose entire outrageous schtick involves being completely tasteless and shamelessly vulgar, were being unleashed upon small children, with the clear purpose both of exposing the children to deviant sexuality and making cross-dressing a more mainstream practice.
Again, it seemed like the would-be thought controllers, with their well-funded patronage, had committed another fatal misstep; rather than applying the tried-and-true “boiling frogs” strategy of transforming society gradually, getting the population adjusted to change one step at a time— just as the murderous chef in the “boiling frogs” metaphor makes the water in the pot just a shade warmer at lengthy intervals, so the hapless frogs barely know what is happening to them until it is too late—they had instead once more turned the dial up to “11” nearly overnight, causing the frogs to leap out of the pot and hop away in alarm. The imposition of such appalling rituals had once more elicited a backlash of epic proportions.
Did they not know that would happen?
Again, as with the rest of their behavior right around 2015, one wonders if they felt that it had become time to step up the cultural revolution, and push more radical notions more forcefully, consequences be damned. (We shall presently turn to the question of why they became so bold and brazen with such abruptness at this juncture.)
****
Another trend worth remarking in 2015 is the decision by then German chancellor Angela Merkel and her elite allies in the EU, to allow huge swaths of third world migrants (always called “refugees”) into Europe, in collaboration with the United Nations (UN), globalist venues like the World Economic Forum (WEF), and various influential NGOs.
Mass immigration has long been an essential tenet of the elite’s post-Cold War agenda for the West, of course. But in 2015, the volume of migrants “welcomed” into the European continent increased massively. Again, a huge backlash followed, the effects of which are being felt in politics to this very day, with nationalist, anti-immigration sentiment growing exponentially in most European countries.
Concomitant with this transparent effort to “de-homogenize” the West by swamping its countries with unneeded and mostly unwanted nonwhite “refugees,” the corporate neoliberal media also began to engage in an escalated orgy of antiwhite propaganda.
The events in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, when a young black man pushed a Pakistani store clerk, attacked a policeman and was afterwards shot dead, touching off weeks of deadly and destructive riots, was seen as the perfect occasion to launch a “whites should be ashamed of their existence” campaign by the editors of journals like Salon, Slate, Vice, HuffPost, and The Guardian, among others.
Just consider some of the following egregious titles churned out by this grisly lot during this interval:
Huffington Post: “Why Aren’t We More Afraid of Young White Men?” (the implication being that we should be more afraid of said group, were it not for the fact that our racism irrationally dissipates the fear we ought to be feeling… I guess)
Huffington Post: “I Don’t Hate White People: I hate Whiteness and White Supremacy” (can you imagine an advocacy journalist, or anyone else, declaring “I don’t hate black people, just ‘blackness’?”)
Huffington Post: “Humanity Has a Serious White Man Problem”
Huffington Post: “Beware of the Average White Man”
The Guardian: “The Whiteness Project will make you wince. Because white people can be rather awful”
Salon: “Why white people get so defensive about their privilege”
Huffington Post: “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person” (aimed at poor and working-class whites, whose destitution would seem to bely the imputation of “privilege,” but the wise old scribes of HuffPo must just know better).
Most egregious of all was an article published in August of 2015 at Huffington Post titled “Towards a Concept of White Wounding.”
Just imagine (I wonder if you can) attempting to frame the “wounding” of an entire race of people as something good and necessary. Advocating the wounding of blacks, browns, Asians, or others would certainly never have flown, but advocating the wounding of whites was somehow considered entirely appropriate!
Of course, making derogatory declarations about white people is hardly new amongst liberal progressive types; however, the sudden abundance of contempt and sheer vitriol towards whites expressed in these articles, published in large, well-funded, and influential journals, represented a stepped-up campaign of race hatred.
***
Finally— to conclude this list of moral horrors with one of a more physical variety— 2015 was the year that “body positivity” was launched.
“Fat shaming” was tut-tutted in Salon’s article, “The Fat Shaming Scandal,” from that year. Similar articles followed from Salon and the rest of the usual suspects, decrying the inhumanity of asking women to live up to “beauty standards” of any sort. A woman could be “healthy at any weight,” they lectured us endlessly.
Corporations and established institutions duly followed suit and displayed virtue-signaling PSAs, just they had with all previously prescribed “nudges” discussed above, save one (the only woke crusade which proved too “hot” for them was the pro-pedo push, although later they were sure to heap scorn on anyone calling out high-level child sex trafficking as “Qanon conspiracy lunatics.”).
In the years to follow, both obese and morbidly obese models would be chosen to be magazine covergirls and beauty pageant winners.
If the “hyperwoke” era which started up in 2015 began with atrocities of child mutilation and racial hatred, it ended on a more comedic note: the sort of laughable farce engendered by “body positivity,” resulting in overweight and unattractive women being quite unconvincingly praised as healthy and beautiful.
This time around, the backlash mostly took the form of sheer, incredulous laughter. What could one do but laugh at demonstratable proof that, as the saying goes, putting lipstick on a pig and expecting it to look any less like a pig? (Or in this case, not even bothering with the lipstick, but still having such delusional expectations…)
https://andynowicki.substack.com/p/2015-the-year-things-got-weird