Michael Rectenwald > Quotes

“Political correctness is a code to silence dissent as western society is razed. The culture wars will erupt into violence, pitting those who defend western values vs. leftists, their 'allies', and the rulers who want to consign western civilization to oblivion.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Art should not be run through ideological councils or committees for approval or banishment.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Further, when markers of race, gender, gender fluidity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion and other factors are the only criteria considered in hiring or admissions, students are cheated, as are those chosen to meet diversity measures on the basis of identity alone. Nothing is more essentialist or constraining than diversity understood strictly in terms of identity.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“People don't often say what they think but rather what they think is permissible.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Well before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Ludwig von Mises showed that far from representing the only rational economic system that could remedy the “anarchy” of the market, the socialist planned economy is utterly irrational. Its irrationality is due to the elimination of the essential indices for determining rational production and distribution – namely, prices.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Socialist ideology rationalizes individual failure by laying it at the feet of the system itself, rather than connecting it with its proximate cause, the individual.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“I walked into a hipster coffee shop and asked for a cup of 'gender fluid'. The cashier just pointed to the barista.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“First, as I showed in Chapter 5, the term “cultural Marxism” refers to a particular Marxist theory and strategy inaugurated by Antonio Gramsci – working to establish “cultural hegemony” in order to effect socialist revolution. Second, the substitution of special identity groups advocated for by social justice activists for the working class championed by Marxists does not lead to an identical or nearly identical politics. With the working class as a lever, Marxism proposes to overcome its nemesis – the capitalist class, which maintains the class system, including a class-based system of production and resource allocation. Social justice, on the other hand, aims at little more than debunking particular identity groups from atop a putative social hierarchy, knocking them from their supposed positions of totemic privilege, and replacing them with members of supposedly subordinated groups. Third, in Chapter 5, I told why Marxism and postmodernism can’t be equated. I’ll restate it here. While postmodern theory is anti-capitalist, it not only rejects capitalism but also other “totalizing” systems, or “meta-narratives,” including even the major system proposed to counter capitalism – Marxism itself.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“epistemological premise derived from postmodern theory holding that language constitutes social (and often all) reality, rather than merely attempting to represent it. Under social and linguistic constructivism, language is considered a material agent – its uses, as tantamount to physical acts.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Diversity, equity and inclusion: this is the new language of totalitarianism. If you think such a notion far-fetched, find the watch-words of Soviet and Sino-Communist totalitarianism and compare them with this new set. Before “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion,” the terms were “equality,” “the people,” “the common good,” and so forth.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom

“Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.” —J.S. Mill.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom

“Bolshevism!”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“But James Damore, whom Google dispatched from its employment and premises without the slightest consideration of his argument or employment rights, could not argue that sexual difference exists at all. In referring to sex difference as a reality, Damore fell victim to yet another contradiction within leftist social justice identity politics and ideology. Unless transgender activists and ideologues conveniently say otherwise, gender has nothing to do with biology.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“speech.” Yet social justice activists – including Antifa, the extracurricular social justice infantry – claim the role of de facto arbiters of speech and assembly. They make no bones about exercising their authority as such. As they see it, the First Amendment is flawed. They aim to fix the inadequacy. Social justice leftists apparently entertain no doubts about their qualifications for official arbiters of speech and other expression. One gets the feeling that they would sooner cut an opponent’s tongue out than allow her to utter a single syllable with which they disagree. And given Antifa’s credo, “by whatever means necessary,” the feeling is not unreasonable. Social justice ideologues are authoritarian and anti-intellectual.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“During the great trials in Moscow, the procurator Andrei Vyshinsky, who was an intellectual with a traditional classical training, threw himself into a veritable frenzy of animalization: “Shoot these rabid dogs! Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that vulture Trotsky, from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism! Let’s put these liars out of harm’s way, these miserable pygmies who dance around rotting carcasses! Down with these abject animals! Let’s put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let their horrible squeals finally come to an end! Let’s exterminate the mad dogs of capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation! Let’s push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down their own throats!” (Qtd. In The Black Book of Communism, p. 750.)”
― Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom

“Human corporal bodies may be registered as machine-readable code and processed by computer networks fed by digital cameras and numerous other inputs of digital information gathering.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom

“Transgender theory can be traced to postmodern theoretical ancestors. Again, a radical social and linguistic constructivism is its basis. According to transgender theory, gender – or even, as the story currently goes, “sexual difference” itself – is determined not by chromosomes, anatomy, hormones, or physiology. Such words can only be used ironically or with derision in a Gender Studies or Women’s Studies classroom. Instead, gender (or even sex difference) is determined by beliefs about sometimes inconveniently “non-conforming” phenomena, and ultimately, by language, by names. Within transgender theory, empirical sex difference or sex has become insignificant and “problematic” at one and the same time.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Fame is not really real,” he said, a statement that he would echo many times. “Nobody is real except the people we're close to.” He cited a passage from Milton’s lyric poem, “Lycidas”:”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Romantic utopianism is the opiate of the leftists.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Diversity is a code word for uniformity of thought.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“discursive violence.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“This made crime much easier: The informer, the torturer, and the NKVD executioner did not denounce, cause suffering, or kill people; they merely eliminated some sort of abstraction that was not beneficial to the common good.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom

“Cultural appropriation” is the social justice version of the trespassing condemned in the Ten Commandments. The term refers to the adoption of elements of a subordinate culture by members of another, usually dominant culture.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“If being a Nazi today is rightly deemed a vile and monstrous identification, then why is it not a disgrace, why is it not abominable to call oneself a progressive or a communist?”
― Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom

“been to counter it with “more” and “better” speech. But the social justice left does not accept common notions of speech or expression. Social justice leftists have adopted from Critical Theory, liberal philosophy, and postmodern theory notions at odds with the U.S. Constitution.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“abridges”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Getting rid of nations, stable gender, the family, Western culture and (why not?) Christianity—the hallmarks of leftist “progress” and avant-garde politicking—also advances global corporatist objectives, removing any remaining obstacles to global corporate dominance.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Beyond Woke

“What do these and other overlapping memberships tell us? First, they expose the incestuous nature of these globalist organizations. But moreover, they illustrate that these Round Table groups and international governance bodies are kindred organizations who share personnel and philosophical outlooks. They reveal the WEF’s deep roots in these older Round Table groups and suggest that the WEF is buttressed by them. They demonstrate that the Great Reset project is not an orphan but rather grew out of these older Round Table organizations and has their implicit endorsement—plus the backing of the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF, etc. Finally, these philosophical and organizational connections make clear that the Great Reset has been in the making for many years, if not decades.”
― Michael Rectenwald, The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda

“Watch out for words like “equity, diversity and inclusion,” or even “the People,” “the common good,” “the general welfare,” and “brotherhood of man.” When in the mouths of politicos, these are the watchwords of totalitarianism”
― Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom

“hominem”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage