When the sheep call you a sheep.

Co-opting the narrative: woke and antifa

Hi everybody,

It’s been interesting to me, from the beginning of this project and the advent of the MAGAherd, that the MagaFolk refer to their political opponents as “sheep”… which is exactly the way, Nietzsche would insist, that sheep would refer to their opponents. Psychological projections like this, at this point, are well understood and easily recognized in the psychopathology of the MAGA movement.

Nietzsche nailed down the best description of what he called “the herd mentality” in his Genealogy of Morals (a pretty easy and dangerous read by the way — and worth the trouble… google up “birds of prey” in chapter 13 of the First Essay). Since he used “sheep” as an example, he really should’ve said flock, instead of herd. But later, in his Thus Spake Zarathustra (cue the music from 2001 Space Odyssey) he spends the whole book describing the little village called “Motley Cow” as filled with herd members — which moves us over to a bovine soaked metaphor.

Maybe that’s why the Maga (and proto-Maga) Herd never figured out the punchline hiding in plain sight in the name of our project here.

Hmm.

But the whole “you’re a sheeple!” thing is fascinating and reminds one of both 1) the projection involved, the way they’ve grounded their personal and moral identity in being victimized by some nebulous oppressor (“They are always evil and hate us which means we’re the good ones”) and 2) the way their governing resentment requires that they coopt and redirect language in order to preserve their sense of resentful and competitive victimhood.

I think this is what frames their appropriation of language to fit the requirements of the stories they tell themselves about who they are — resentful and reactive sheep — conditioned entirely by who they’ve identified as their most threatening oppressors; by who they are not: blacks, hispanics, women and, of course, the most dangerous of all, drag queens.

I had a couple of easy, recent and obvious, examples in mind — but first, let’s take a moment to enjoy a meme-able quote¹ and the pictographic summary of these same ideas that the AI coughed up when I asked about hysterical sheep.

With that framework in mind, let’s review a couple of recent appropriations?

[These are pretty obvious….]

Remember when “woke” meant “sensitive to and aware of the degree to which certain minority populations are treated like crap in America and shouldn’t be because we can do better and they’re owned equal rights and equal treatment under the Constitution”? Remember that? Yep. memes on this one are now everywhere.

Or here, about about “antifa.”

Remember when “antifa” meant “anti-fascist” as in “opposed to the totalitarian impulse that ignores the rule of law in order to enable the ruler’s power-besotted greed, fear, and hate to wreak widespread chaos, carnage, and destitution solely in order to work out their own, gnawing, father-hatred related pathologies”? Remember that one?

Yep. These perfectly good words, designed to denote positive and human responses to real oppression, have been coopted by the MagaHerd’s resentment machinery to mean … well, something mean.

Ope! Even worse and more current is the phrase “underage women” to describe, legally and morally speaking, the “CHILDREN” Epstein (and supposedly the current inhabitant of the White House) preferred to … you know… “women.”

If you have you own recent favorites, please share ‘em here!

Whenever I run into this kind of cognitive dissonance I’m alway reminded of a favorite quote from the Firesign Theater:

“Sure, understanding today’s complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But, there they are.”

And here we are.

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1. btw, I stumbled on this quote somewhere in the swampy undergrowth of the interwebs where it was originally attribute to, of all people, Gary Snyder — which was weird enough to require a little aerial recon … at which point any provenance evaporated like swamp gas… or whatever the internet version of that is. Let me know if you can find anything, it opened up a fascinating and weird rabbit hole. I recommend it to the advanced practicus.