Clown World As A Uniform
An absurd Navy training video teaching sailors to respect gender pronouns has leaked and it is making its rounds on the internet and other media. Sadly, few are now surprised that our military spends its training time indoctrinating members in how to create a safe and inclusive environment. What is truly striking about the video, however, is its juvenile nature. The background set features the horrific flat-human art that has become ubiquitous in all government and corporate HR propaganda. The hosts are terribly awkward and use the stilted yet patronizing speech of a 1980s after-school special repurposed to push the woke agenda. It serves as a reminder that even the most serious and critical institutions in our nation are subject to the buffoonish social codes that now define every human interaction.
The cartoonishly dystopian nature of pronoun protocols, trans-admirals, and drag queen story hour has given rise to the term “clown world” to describe the state of our culture. When the social norms being enforced around you every day seem like they belong in a comedy sketch, the only way to stay sane is to mock them for what they are. This is a totally understandable, and frankly healthy, response. The woke commissars that try to ruin our lives at every step deserve to be disrespected and mocked, but we should also understand why they are obsessed with enforcing such a ludicrous moral order.
The knee-jerk reaction of many conservatives is to dismiss woke cultural norms as insane, crazy, or bizarre. That sentiment can be very dangerous, causing us to turn a blind eye to the utility these beliefs offer as instruments of power. When wokeness first started to emerge on college campuses most mainstream conservative voices dismissed it as a fadish craze students would abandon once they entered the real world. Now those students have entered corporations and government bureaucracies across their country, and wokeness reigns supreme. Again, it is perfectly reasonable, even necessary, to mock these beliefs for their absurdity, but we should not make the mistake of ignoring their power.
The military has been sliding towards wokeness for a very long time. It seems sudden to us because many examples are now becoming public, but training of the sort we have seen in the leaked Navy video is nothing new. The military has been slowly pushing right-leaning members out of the door for a decade and has been actively purging conservatives from its ranks since the events of January 6th, 2021. Something as simple as voting for Trump, voicing conservative viewpoints online, or having an NRA membership could raise suspicions. Refusing the COVID19 vaccination could see you dishonorably discharged. Being forced to agree with gender-pronoun madness is simply another selection mechanism used to force members who may not like where the government is heading to step aside.
Gender ideology and critical race theory (crt) may look like nonsense from the outside, but getting people to agree with nonsense has an impact. As Curtis Yarvin pointed out many years ago:
Wokeness is a powerful way to separate friend from enemy in a culture war. Conservatives may be willing to jump through many ridiculous hoops to stay off the radar and keep their jobs in woke corporations or government institutions, but inevitably, if things get crazy enough they run into a line they cannot cross. Eventually signaling allegiance to the ruling ideology becomes too costly for those who were just going along to get along. Give preferential treatment to employees with the right intersectional status? Okay. Use Latinx on company forms? Sure I guess. Pretend the guy who was named John last week is now they/them? Fine. Trans your kids to show how tolerant and accepting you are? Okay, I’m out.
As crazy as it may seem, getting someone to commit to the rules of clown world is a powerful tool for the regime. It is one thing for people to begrudgingly comply to get along, another for them to fully embrace and enforce the absurd. If you can get someone to parade around proudly proclaiming nonsense you know you own them. The uniform may be clown shoes and a red rubber nose, but it is a uniform nonetheless. And if you have a uniform you have an army.
Knowingly commiting to lies corrupts your soul.
It also has the advantage of serving no other purpose. Covid masks make/made a good marker of allegiance, but are justified in some minds as having legit utility. Doing something explicitly retarded makes you admit to yourself and others that you're just a thrall. The old X-Wing series once theorized that this was why the Emperor named all his Star Destroyers "The Domestic Abuser" and whatnot.
The downside is that this takes the elite a step closer to upgrading their street enforcers from random punks to uniformed and uniformed brute squads. The upside is this pants-on-head behavior might be a boon to us. If tens of thousands of essentially normal people get ejected from the hierarchy, what can they do except parallelism?
The regime is gambling, whether it knows it or not, that its technology and processes are advanced enough that they can afford to jettison the worthwhile people. We'll see.