The Right's Brave New World 'Vibe Shift': Never Having To Say You're Sorry For Saying The R-Word
We are under no obligation to go along with it.
The greatest victory of the last election, for what appears to be a truly startling number of people, is the belief that they can now use the word “retard” with abandon, and not in the context of music theory. They’re near-ecstatic about it, which is weird because, aside from being a slur and unnecessarily hurtful to people with intellectual disabilities and the families and friends who love them, it has the effect of making anyone who uses it in that sense sound far less intelligent than the person they’re hoping to denigrate.
That being said, like Glinda explained to Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz, the power to use that word was inside them all along. It was never illegal. It just had the effect of making people think that whoever said it was an asshole, which it still does.
The word has not just magically become acceptable to say, and everyone who would have thought someone was an asshole for using it still thinks they are an asshole for using it. The difference is that those saying it now feel as though they have social power they did not have before the election.
That, really, has been the crux of everything for several years now. They feel as though they have been denied the social power and cultural influence to which they are entitled, and even though literally nothing has changed beyond a president who didn’t even win the popular vote by a whole percentage point running roughshod over the entire federal government, they are frantically declaring a vibe shift.
For the past few days, they haven’t seemed to be able to land on whether Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show was an example of this vibe shift or a rude defiance of it.
According to the fine folks over at Bari Weiss’s “Free Press” …
This year, another vibe shift. The NFL changed the message stenciled into the end zone from “End Racism” to “Choose Love.” Trump showed up — the first sitting president to do so — and his favorite patriotic walk-on song, “God Bless the USA,” was heard playing in the stadium. Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance featured a nagging Uncle Sam character (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who told the rapper not to be “too ghetto,” but when backup dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed the American flag, it felt more patriotic than political, even though his song “Alright” is perhaps best known as BLM’s unofficial anthem. And in another patriotic move, Kendrick performed “Not Like Us,” his Grammy Award–winning diss track against one of America’s new trade war enemies — Canadian rapper Drake.
Yeah, so … the whole thing was actually a metaphor for mass incarceration. The dancers were supposed to be on a prison yard. Lamar referenced Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” This was not about patriotism. (That being said, despite what they may believe, conservatives don’t actually own the American flag, and supporting Black Lives Matter doesn’t make you not patriotic. What a strange thing for Bari Weiss’s people to think.)
Others, as we mentioned on Monday, were outraged by the fact that there were no white people involved in Lamar’s performance — which, again, purposely featured all Black dancers (you know, because the whole point was the racial disparities in our criminal justice system).
As if they wouldn’t have complained about it while Joe Biden was president. Please. They call the Super Bowl halftime show Satanic literally every year.
Over on Fox News, Liz Peek also claimed that the Super Bowl signaled a vibe shift, though her focus was primarily on commercials and people booing Taylor Swift.
Witness the stirring clip of Brad Pitt introducing the Super Bowl with an unabashedly proud homage to the United States, a montage that included representations of the Founders signing the Declaration of Independence, video of cowboys on horseback waving Old Glory, clips of NASA engineers and first responders and those who protested for racial equality.
(Uh, wasn’t the latter part of the problem for these people?)
Pitt says about the U.S.: “Isn’t that union at the core of this day, and this glorious chaotic exasperating experiment that is us?” He finishes his narrative saying, “Today we celebrate the urgency of now, the thrill of what’s next, the glory of this game, and we do it as one.” How refreshing, a message of unity after four years of divisiveness.
Many of the Super Bowl ads demonstrated the country’s course-correct. Jeep’s flag-bedecked ad featured Harrison Ford broadcasting a critical message: “Freedom is for everybody. But it isn’t free. It’s earned.” Photos of GIs storming beaches drove home his message.
Hey! Hey! You know who those GIs were fighting? Nazis.
You know who Harrison Ford endorsed last election? Kamala Harris.
You know who used his Academy Award acceptance speech to criticize the Senate for not allowing witnesses at Donald Trump’s impeachment trial? Brad Pitt.
Do these people not understand that the Super Bowl, every year, is full of odes to Old Glory and our unity, that they think this is a “course-correct”? Is this more of their disingenuous bullshit, or is every day for them truly new and fresh as a newborn kitten in snow?
But that’s just one example of one topic. Across the board, the Right has been trying to manufacture a new reality — one in which it is commonly accepted that trans people don’t exist, that straight white politically conservative Christian men are not only the most oppressed minority, but the only oppressed minority, that it is socially acceptable to be openly racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, and, of course, to use slurs of any kind. Or, you know, salute Hitler.
Venture capitalist Santiago Pilego — part of a deeply weird company called New Founding that is trying to create a Christian anti-woke conclave in the (otherwise religiously diverse and woke?) state of Kentucky — wrote an almost-poem last year about what he imagines the “vibe shift” to be.
The Vibe Shift looks like ditching childless civilizational nihilism and saying, yeah, having kids is good, actually.
(No one ever said that people who want kids shouldn’t have kids, just that both choices are ok!)
The Vibe Shift is the repudiation of homogenizing hyperglobalism and instead intentionally pursuing the communal, the local, and the national.
(So, xenophobia.)
The Vibe Shift is the rejection of reality denial and instead embracing that men and women are unique and different.
(So, transphobia.)
The Vibe Shift is the refusal to subordinate yourself and your family to the whims and anxieties of activists and bureaucrats and relearning to trust your eyes and ears.
(So, ignorance.)
The Vibe Shift is the rejection of secular liberal materialism and a return to the Christian foundations of the West.
(So, Christian Nationalism.)
The Vibe Shift is taking off the ironic veil that aims to cover the festering wounds of despair and putting on the vestments of seriousness instead.
(So … who the fuck knows, honestly, but it doesn’t sound like anything Elon Musk is currently doing.)
The Vibe Shift is laughing at those trying to demonize men and cheerfully proclaiming “Dudes rock.”
(So, being a giant weirdo about a thing that wasn’t happening to begin with — either that or deciding that the things men were criticized for doing, like sexual harassment and assault, actually “rock.”)
The Vibe Shift is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete.
(By being completely disingenuous.)
The Vibe Shift is a healthy suspicion of credentialism and a return to human judgment.
(So, again, more ignorance.)
The Vibe Shift is living not by lies, and instead speaking the truth—whatever the cost.
(Going to assume this is also about transphobia.)
The Vibe Shift is directly facing our tumultuous times, refusing to blackpill, and choosing to build instead.
(Oh for fuck’s sake.)
Another thing they keep doing is tweeting “We don’t believe you anymore” at Democratic politicians and whatever they consider “the liberal media” — in hopes of making it look like all of these people who were definitely voting for Democrats or watching normal news shows before, but who have been betrayed (how though?) and now see the truth. Or something like that. It’s honestly a little sad.
Part of this is in imitation of Trump’s tendency to make bizarre, hyperbolic, extreme claims and make going along with them a loyalty test.
However, a very large part of it is also that they think they are replicating what the Left did with regard to what they understand as “woke.” They think we just made up new rules for everyone to follow in order to trip them up and get them in trouble for no reason — sort of like how old money people made up weird new etiquette rules (like a raised pinky while drinking tea) in order to trip up the nouveau riche during the Gilded Age. They think we took things that weren’t real problems (specifically anti-Black racism) and made a big thing out of them in order to make them feel like bad people. They think we invented trans people just to personally annoy them.
They literally think that intersectionality means that the more forms of oppression one experiences, the better they are and the more valid their opinion on every possible topic.
They created a completely insane narrative in their heads where all of this was about personally hurting them and creating a hierarchy in which they were at the bottom — instead of dismantling the hierarchy altogether. They played games of telephone, creating a bizarro thing they called “wokeism” that was about as tethered to any reality as their Pizzagate and QAnon nonsense was. They believed that people went along with this not because they believed it, but because it was popular.
This is why they keep repeating that they won the culture war. It’s why Musk bought Twitter. It’s why Trump keeps augmenting reality, putting out executive orders banning paper straws and changing the names of places, legalizing bribery while claiming he’s rooting out corruption and “draining the swamp.” It’s why they keep repeating that Trump won the popular vote in a “landslide” despite the fact that it wasn’t even a whole percent, why they keep weirdly trying to claim that the US only became “divided” under Biden, why they keep repeating their claim that DEI is racist and “illegal” and that they are doing “civil rights” by getting rid of that and other diversity efforts, while using the term as an obvious substitute for the n-word.
It’s why these weirdos regularly tell one another blatant Jacob Wohl, “overheard hipsters in a coffee shop”-style tall tales.
The goal is to make everyone feel as though they are in a brave new world and must quickly adjust if they want to be part of the new zeitgeist. They want to do to us what they imagine we did to them. They think no one can tell the difference between their disingenuousness and our sincerity.
But here’s what they don’t understand.
Their blatant white supremacist bullshit is not anywhere near as mainstream as they think. They may have control over Twitter now, but no one normal is on there anymore, and they’ve turned it into such a filthy cesspool that it will no longer have the influence and power for social change that it once did (the fact that the journalists have left won’t help either). They can claim to have won the culture war all they want, but that’s gonna be real hard for people who don’t actually produce any culture to maintain. They may have won an election, but a whole lot of people didn’t know what they were actually getting — the worse they make things though, the more those people are going to pay attention.
For those of us who have actual values and actually care about real things, it literally does not matter what other people are doing or thinking or saying. It doesn’t matter what the “mainstream” is doing. We will still think people who say ignorant things are ignorant and still think that people who use the “r” word or any other slur are repulsive, because they are repulsive. Deeply, deeply repulsive.
And they’re going to remind people of that better than we ever could.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
I just left a hipster coffee shop, packed with liberals whispering amongst each other about the efficient sharing of social security numbers spearheaded Big Balls and the Muskrat audit posse. America is VIBING!
If you are doing an audit, you bring in forensic accountants, not pimple-faced wannabe frat bois.
IF you are doing an audit, you do not hide what you are doing.
If you are doing an audit, you do not shut down the entire program/industry/department illegally.
If you are doing an audit involving billions of dollars, it does not take 24 hours. It takes months or over a year.
I have little doubt that Americans, who seem to be rather stupid, are chirping approvingly about "Action!" and "DISRUPTION!", because they're stupid... at least until the checks stop coming from Washington or mom has to beg by the overpass for cat food money or their kid's school's special ed class gets cut because Federal education money is now block grants and their state government just gave the money to an ex-football player or they get fired because they were too stupid to realize their job depended on government money.