The Social World

Tag: woke

  • South Park has lost the plot

    South Park has lost the plot

    Since 1997, South Park has satirized just about every group in modern life while hilariously positioning itself as the voice of moderation. Yet with the premier of Season 27 last week, the show seems to have lost sight of reality, instead circling the drain of MSNBC-style political delirium. Far from rejecting the extremes of American politics, the shows repositions leftist extremism as the new moderation. 

    The new season’s first episode shows the Principal, who was once politically correct, embrace devout Christianity in an America where wokeness is effectively illegal and Christian Nationalism reigns supreme. The town’s adults are annoyed to see public schools foist religion on the kids, so they organize their usual rabble-rousing resistance. But they’re stymied by President Donald Trump, a “tin-pot dictator” who’s quite literally in bed with Satan. 

    The Right reacted predictably, arguing that South Park has been historically hypocritical in skewering conservatives while generally giving the Left a pass. That’s not quite true; creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have certainly dinged the Left over the years, mocking everything from atheism to the racial-grievance industry, and even the new season pokes fun at wokeness. Recently, however, a double standard has subtly emerged. While the Left is satirized as overzealous but well-meaning, the Right is portrayed as a Leftist caricature.

    Over the last several seasons, conservatives cheered as Randy got sucked into a hypocritical PC frat, the school got taken over by a crusading PC Principal, and Disney got labeled “lame and gay” for making everything about diversity. Yet the moral warning against wokeness didn’t speak to its purposeful destruction and latent totalitarianism, but rather viewed it as empathy run amok – silly and often disingenuous, but not much more. 

    The new episode abandons all subtlety, with the woke crowd cynically embracing Christianity. Wokeness is rightly seen as transactional, but the comparison is far more unflattering to Christians than it is to the Left. PC Principal remains an absurd character who simply seeks an outlet for his performative “compassion” – apparently just like the adherents of the world’s largest religion. 

    But it’s Trump who mostly gets blamed for the world going to hell, as the episode embraced every trite Leftist talking point imaginable. “Woke is dead,” we’re told, because “you can just say ‘retarded’ now, nobody cares” after Trump shredded the Constitution. Trump’s staunchest supporters turn against him for his supposedly obvious extremism and corruption, as he personally profits from the presidency, censors the media, and has CBS journalists groveling in fear. He aims to install a Christian dictatorship, all while cavorting with Jeffrey Epstein and having sex with Satan. And just to rub it all in, we’re dealt multiple shots of his microphallus. 

    After decades of thoughtful insight, Parker and Stone have reached their final form of establishment shitlibbery. Whatever even-handed grasp of social reality the show once had is gone, lost to the creators’ apparently terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Far from satirizing the TDS of the townsfolk, the satirical subtext of the show is that the deranged are all bravely correct – the rest of the country is just too scared or corrupt to admit it. Trump really is a unique threat, and the comparatively sane liberal establishment is cowering under his boot. 

    Since the ’90s, South Park generally stuck to the same shtick: the adults get swept away in a moral panic before the kids emerge as the voice of reason. All politicians, religions, and identities were fair game – no one was spared, but neither was anyone truly demonized. Instead, the lesson was always the same: extremes are morally equivalent, moderation is key, and we should all view our ideological drives with a healthy dose of skepticism. There’s a reason the term “South-Park Republican” came to describe an old-guard classical liberal attuned to the modern age. 

    With Parker and Stone unable to recognize where extremism lies, this shtick no longer holds. The truly moderate – as well as the truly subversive – insight is that Trump himself is simply a South-Park Republican: a 90’s-style pragmatist clinging to the same moral vision of a free, prosperous and meritocratic America that most people generally shared when South Park first aired. In an age when the other side has gone fully insane and normalized its own extremism, he’s fighting for sanity in the best way he can under the circumstances. 

    A good satire must always grasp the underlying truth it’s meant to elevate. Unfortunately, it seems that South Park has lost the plot. 

  • UNESCO is America’s toxic ex

    UNESCO is America’s toxic ex

    “I’m having financial problems,” a long-ago ex-girlfriend desperately messaged me some years after our third breakup, before tossing a convoluted word salad trying to make a case that I should give her money. I refused and told her that although I felt very sorry for her, it would be better for both of us if we had no further contact. Fortunately, we haven’t. As President Trump cuts America’s ties with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for the third time, this would seem to be the best approach.

    UNESCO was founded in 1945 to advance the cause of international peace through intellectual and cultural programs under the auspices of the newly created United Nations. Anyone familiar with the history of the world over the last eighty years can tell you how well that has gone, but the United States was long foundational to UNESCO’s work, at times contributing as much as 25 percent of its annual budget. This was certainly generous for an organization that claims 194 member states and twelve associate members, especially considering what UNESCO has done with the funds.

    Announcing the U.S. withdrawal last week, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said “continued involvement in UNESCO is not in the national interest” of the US because “UNESCO works to advance divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy.”

    In addition to the relationship yet again no longer working out for us, Bruce added that “UNESCO’s decision to admit the ‘State of Palestine’ as a Member State is highly problematic, contrary to US policy, and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.” Indeed, at UNESCO’s most recent executive board meeting in April, three of its agenda’s eleven “program issues” dwelled on Israel, which the organization has described as “occupied Palestine” or “the occupied Arab territories,” while referring to Jewish holy sites as “Palestinian World Heritage sites.”

    A UNESCO initiative discouragingly titled “Transforming MENtalities” seeks to “change mindsets and policies by…shedding light on how to successfully engage men and boys for gender equality” and blames “patriarchal masculinities” for playing “an important role in driving conflict and insecurity worldwide.” American parents might be forgiven for not wanting UN bureaucrats to tell them how to raise their sons in any circumstances, particularly at their expense, but one of this initiative’s “cornerstone” projects, released last November, is a report called “The Gender Equality Quest in Video Games,” which laments that women are underrepresented among video-game characters and video-game-industry professionals.

    Along with that pressing issue, UNESCO’s “Anti-Racism Toolkit” recommends governments acknowledge “structural racism” in their societies and implement “systemic changes” to address it. The recommended ways of doing so would appear to be unlawful across American institutions today. In a direct swipe at the US, which remains UNESCO’s highest contributor of funds, the Anti-Racism Toolkit claims that measures taken in response to Black Lives Matter and George Floyd are “limited” and require UNESCO’s sage help to expand. No thanks.

    Bruce’s statement concluded that “continued US participation in international organizations will focus on advancing American interests with clarity and conviction.” This has long been true. Ronald Reagan took the US out of UNESCO in 1984, citing corruption, mismanagement, outsized Soviet influence, and general anti-American bias, including a developing world plan to license journalists that seemed likely to censor international news coverage by American media. George W. Bush reentered the organization two decades later as a gesture toward restoring multilateralism in foreign relations but also as a cultural adjunct in the war on terrorism, and – yes – amid emotional assurances that UNESCO had changed. Trump pulled out again in 2018 over the Israel issue, only for a sorrowful Joe Biden to woo positive world opinion in 2023 by pledging to rejoin and pay over $600 million in supposedly outstanding dues accrued after Trump’s withdrawal. Some men send flowers.

    Our current breakup with UNESCO will not take effect until December 31, 2026, giving its meddlesome minders ample time to try to crawl back with more empty promises and false assurances that they have changed and will finally treat us right. But for the Trump administration, and all future US leaders, it would probably be best if we had no further contact.