The age of bullshit thickens. It’s pandemic. On social media, one can conjure and manicure a false image at will.
Perhaps you’ve seen the posts. Syrupy pseudo-waffle. “Inspirational” bilge. You, mutated monkey, can make a difference.
The worst enthrall themselves to the narcissism of the author. You know, those synthetic bores who implore you to separate your mind from your wallet and cough up a few dollars for their “arduous” charity trek to Machu Picchu. The withering souls.
They’re “raising awareness.” Visiting the grandest of settings is no vacation! It’s for the children. Or the dolphins. Or, perhaps, the dolphin’s children. I forget.
Such “journeys” are always sugared in self-righteousness. The sacrifice. Every little helps.
Harry, when not enthralled with hectoring the proles on their unconscious bias, pumped 20 tons of carbon into the atmosphere—three times the average annual carbon footprint of those he and Meghan lecture wantonly. Delicious.
Better yet, such hoodwinkery at least employs something of an intellectual musk.
If you want to beseech your friends, employ anaphora. That is, in short, the repetition of words.
A rhetorical device older than rocks, anaphora appeals to the emotions, persuades, inspires, motivates, encourages, fools.
It is simple. Repeat the same word or words. Anaphora juices any statement. Lend it emphasis. Lend it panache. Lend it gravitas.
One such example resides within the wokest of them all: Prince Harry.
Last month, the eco-warrior prince posted on Instagram: “With nearly 7.7 billion people inhabiting this Earth, every choice, every footprint, every action makes a difference.”
This week, Harry and wife Meghan were busy making a difference. They gallivanted around Europe on a private jet that burns, per hour, a seamy 247 gallons of fuel. A plummy trip to Nice, followed by a few days in Ibiza.
Harry, when not enthralled with hectoring the proles on their unconscious bias, pumped 20 tons of carbon into the atmosphere—three times the average annual carbon footprint of those he and Meghan lecture wantonly.
Delicious.
It gets tastier. Meghan writes Facebookian motivational messages on bananas and hands them out to sex workers, whose only commodity is the flesh forked on their bones. A social malady Meghan assumes can be remedied with a dose of potassium and a few Biro-ed quotes.
Such wokeness is perhaps what drives the “populism,” the hobgoblin terrorizing the pages of the Financial Times.
The Tedious Greta
Most ordinary people, when beset by Trustafarians blocking their route to work, urging them to drop the steak, feel little more than contempt for those who feel so anointed to save the planet.
But such self-loathing isn’t confined to those helplessly grasping at the last blush of youth.
Greta Thunberg is a mere 16-years-old. Yet, the environmental demi-deity enjoys a kind of papal infallibility.
Little Miss Thunberg is currently slicing across the globe she so despises, on a sailing boat. This is to “prove” to the proles that flying is unnecessary.
Which it is—if you’re the daughter of an uber-rich family.
After all, and as helpfully revealed by The Spectator’s Barometer, sailing from Fredrikstad, Norway, to Amsterdam takes nine days and costs around $1,000. Flying from Oslo to Amsterdam takes just over 90 minutes, and costs $120.
Of course, one must not criticize her and instead accept her every word—she is young and therefore “wise.”
And that advice goes for anyone who dares to question or mock the hypocrisy of the woke.
Those critical of Harry and Meghan’s carbon-happy gallivants were denounced as racist, the final reduction of any criticism directed towards the hypocritical and self-serving woke elite.
An elite that employs the language of oppression, dons the cloak of broke, while born into ruthless privilege.
Yet, it is the proles who are apparently defective—their opposition to wage-killing immigration. Their pining of outsourced middle-class jobs, dressed up as a primitive racial animus.
More Blanket than Bludgeon
Because the woke elite cannot afford a debate. After all, they’ve ruined pretty much everything. But, as a good friend insists: it is never about what they say it is about.
Their woke agenda is more blanket than bludgeon, employed to suffocate any criticism of the grand globalization party which fattens them senseless, as the forgotten ingest fentanyl.
And it is effective. Hence the Democratic pivot from one chimera to another. Depleted of their wholly fatuous Russia collusion narrative, the corporate Democrats now center upon the president’s “racism.”
Which means anything that might erode the power—and bottom line—of their corporate paymasters.
Because that is the rub. Ask Tucker Carlson.
Question the validity of a decaying landscape in which a vanishingly small elite devours the spoils, and you’ll invite trouble and the derision of woke foot-soldiers who fight on behalf of those who shunt them into an Uber gig and convince them of their privilege.
But, like anaphora, once the deception is exposed, its once omnipotent magic is revealed as mush.