More Right-Wing Weak Sauce from Charles Eisenstein, posing as Balance and Wisdom
In latest post, Charles parrots Right-Wing lies, but never Left-Wing talking points. But he 'won't choose sides,' don't ya know?
In the last year or two, Charles Eisenstein appeared on a podcast called “Leaving the Left.”
This week, he was a guest on Bret Weinstein’s “Dark Horse” podcast, where the two men speculated at length about whether RFK Jr. is being blackmailed. You see, RFK Jr. is saying and doing some things with which Bret Weinstein vehemently disagrees. And yet, Bret supported (supports?) RFK Jr.
Surely you can see the calamity here? It is simply impossible, in Bret’s view, that he could have made a significant error in judgment. There is no way that Bret could have been wrong about RFK Jr. Since Bret Weinstein being way-off-base is not an option in Bret’s mind, that leaves only one scenario.
It’s not that Weinstein has sh*tty judgment. It’s that RFK Jr. is being blackmailed!
Thank goodness for the unparalleled insight of Weinstein, spewing his Very-True and definitely Not-Made-Up political analysis in the direction of huge numbers of impressionable listeners.
During the conversation between Charles and Bret, Charles made mention of “the Woke Craze.”
I’d love to hear Charles get specific and unpack that. What exactly does “woke” mean to you? Is there anything good about so-called “woke,” or “DEI”? How much awareness of historical and continuing injustice and oppression is ‘too much’ in your view?
Charles won’t get specific because his platitudes function best as abstractions. If he were too specific, then everyone could see what his fawning followers refuse to see: that he is parroting Right-Wing talking points, falsehoods, and exaggerations.
“The Woke Craze” is A RIGHT-WING TALKING POINT.
So, let’s check out Eisenstein’s latest essay, “When Politics Becomes War,” to see if we spot more Right-Wing talking points…
A few paragraphs in, Charles writes of
“The disastrous public health response to Covid…”
This is an opinion, stated as if it were a fact.
He continues,
“After decades of declining health and rising chronic disease, for which no single external culprit could be identified, finally here was a threat that could be identified and controlled. So, all of the public’s anxiety was projected onto the new scary bad guy. The habit of find-the-enemy thinking is what made the public so susceptible to policies that ranged from the foolish to the absurd to the tyrannical.”
Ah, yes, I can hear our evil overlords now, cackling in their marble and oak strongholds of shadowy power, “Finally! Here is a threat that can be identified and controlled! Now, all of the public’s anxiety can be projected onto the new scary bad guy!”
This sounds exactly like public health officials and office holders. And we know this cannot be an exaggeration or a caricature, because, according to him and his followers, Charles never does that!
Any sense from Eisenstein that the COVID-19 pandemic was an incredibly challenging, once-in-a-lifetime global catastrophe, in which many millions of people died? Any sense that Charles has reflected for more than three seconds on “What Is It Like” to be a public health official, or an emergency room doctor? Or a person whose dad died from Covid?
Of course not. As I’ve stated before, Charles’s “what is it like to be you?” truism is usually reserved for Right-Wingers only. But that won’t keep his followers from not noticing!
INTERLUDE: Let me state here that I’ve been familiar with the concepts of ‘othering,’ ‘dehumanization,’ and ‘us-and-them thinking’ for about 35 years, since I watched Sam Keen’s great film (and book) Faces of the Enemy in the early 90s. So Charles’s preoccupation with dehumanization, othering, and war mentality is not particularly new to me. I think these are important topics. However, I find Eisenstein’s application of these ideas quite lacking, and one-sided. I also think he doesn’t fully understand the concepts. He regularly conflates and confuses pedestrian insults with dehumanization, disagreements with othering, and stating-the-truth-about-what-is-happening with war mentality. There is a literature on this topic! There are definitions of these words.
Perhaps the most glaring example of politicized othering in recent years has been the transphobic ‘moral panic’ ginned up and enflamed and ridden like Seabiscuit by the Republican Party.
I’ve never seen Charles mention the anti-trans crusade of the Republican Party when he talks about othering. His most animated concerns kicked in only when he was personally affected. Reading Charles’s essays, one could come away thinking that “dehumanization” of the unvaccinated is The MAJOR ISSUE facing our society. In Charles’s hyperventilating Covid essays, he painted a near-future with pogroms against the unvaxxed. A future with no hugging. A grey existence in which children never see a human smile. Did any of that happen? No. But Charles never admits that he was wrong, no matter how reckless and fear-mongering his prose.
OK. Back to his essay, “When Politics Becomes War”:
A few paragraphs further down, Eisenstein writes,
“In a functioning democracy in which all parties believe in a constitution or in a set of norms and values, there are certain taboos they will not violate for victory’s sake. Politics in the United States and many other countries is veering closer and closer to war—inevitable when each side sees the other as the embodiment of evil. Today in my country, both left and right are quite certain that the other side is a ‘threat to democracy itself.’
In that certainty, each becomes exactly what the other fears. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
BOTH SIDES, am I right?
If one of the two major parties in the United States is MUCH MORE of a THREAT to DEMOCRACY than the other, you will not learn that from reading Eisenstein. False Equivalence is the coin of this realm.
Later on, Eisenstein casually mentions “the old political elite,” as opposed to “Trumpian usurpers.”
See what he did there?
Trump and his corporate, billionaire backers are somehow not the elite. In his view, only Democratic politicians are the “elite” and the “establishment.” Trump, and Republican Party leaders, and Trump’s gaggle of billionaires are just upstart outsiders.
It is this soft logic that allowed Eisenstein to REJECT OUT OF HAND the possibility that voting for Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party may be the most ethical, loving option. Charles’s MASSIVE BIAS against the Democratic Party is reflected in his pre-election warning to his readers about “the catastrophe of another Democratic administration.”
In that same pre-election essay, “Shades of Many Colors,” Charles claimed that Trump was a changed man; and pretty mellow, if you have backroom experience like Charles; and not nearly the ogre his critics allege; and not even right-wing. Meanwhile, according to Eisenstein, the Black-asian-woman candidate, who had policy proposals that would directly benefit poor and working-class Americans; who wanted workers to get all the overtime pay they are owed; who had a game-changing proposal to enable Medicare to cover the costs of home care; who cared about the fundamental freedoms of women and girls and the protections of Roe v. Wade—she was the establishment; a vote for Harris could not even be mentioned as a possibility by Eisenstein.
And still, his followers gushed, ‘Wow! You have truly covered every possibility with your open-hearted embrace of every viewpoint.’
You see, one of my major issues with Charles’s work is not that he lovingly and compassionately holds all people, and all perspectives.
It’s that he doesn’t.
And yet his writing, and his fawning followers, pretend that he does.
After sending this ‘Many Colors’ essay to his fans, in which he fabricates Trump’s ‘hidden virtues,’ and declares that a Harris presidency would be catastrophic, he augments his terrible judgment with gas-lighting, by acting as if he has not endorsed Donald Trump.
Sorry, bro. That is not how things work.
If—during the white-hot final weeks of a presidential election—you issue a public statement that ‘Trump is cool. Harris would be catastrophic,’ you have just endorsed Donald Trump, no matter what baloney you try to spin for yourself and your readers.
Now, returning to Eisenstein’s most recent essay, '“When Politics Becomes War,” we get to a paragraph that exemplifies Charles’s right-wing views.
“In the United States the opposition politician, Donald Trump, survived the lawfare and won the election. The question is, is that a victory for democracy, or is it just a victory for Donald Trump? Will he end the political weaponization of federal agencies like the Justice Department, the IRS, the State Department, CISA, the CIA, and the FBI, or will he merely direct them at new targets? Will he restore free speech and civil liberties, or will he apply the tools of censorship and surveillance to new enemies?”
Eisenstein’s use of the term, “lawfare,” is A RIGHT-WING TALKING POINT.
Charles’s false accusation—which he states as obvious, commonsense—that the Biden administration ‘weaponized’ the Department of Justice and other agencies, is false; is a lie; and is A RIGHT-WING TALKING POINT.
I would love for Charles to get specific. It is much harder to BS your readers when you hold yourself accountable to specificity.
GIVE AN EXAMPLE, Charles, of the Democratic administration’s ‘weaponization of the Justice Department.’
Seriously.
Specifics, as opposed to generalities, can allow the reader to evaluate for themselves. Or they can reveal the writer as biased, ill-informed, cult-pilled, right-wing, or not-knowing-what-they-are-talking-about. Specifics are risky, which is why some writers studiously avoid them.
In another paragraph, Eisenstein states the following about the recent Democratic administration:
“[Trump’s] opponents [the Democrats] might, in a moment of honesty, admit that yes, they did weaponize the courts, the FBI, etc. against Trump and his allies, and engage in various kinds of cheating, but what choice did they have, when a neo-fascist movement was about to take over the country?”
THIS IS FALSE. THIS IS BULLSHIT. THIS IS A RIGHT-WING TALKING POINT.
And, also, GIVE A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE.
If you dare.
Further on in the essay, Charles writes,
What both sides believe is that the other side lusts for power more than it values democracy.
Well, sure. That is true. But does that mean you are incapable of evaluating these claims yourself? Is one claim much more valid than the other? If it is, why not say so?
Toward the end, Eisenstein notes,
“In preparing this essay, I sought some personal stories of the impact of the DOGE cuts to illuminate and humanize the damage. A friend introduced me to some small farmers in a certain left-leaning back-to-the-land region. They were unwilling to speak with me.”
He never actually gives his readers “stories of the impact of the DOGE cuts.” But he wanted to. Were there no news reports or articles on this? Not a single example or anecdote available on the google-machine?
OK… that’s about the extent of what I wanted to comment upon.
I find the whole “cooties” motif overblown and silly, and, like other riffs in this essay, and others, part of an attempt to blunt criticism. In this and previous writings, Charles has started to respond to persistent critiques of his work by saying things like, ‘some will say I’m doing false-equivalence and both-sides-ism, but I’m not.’
However, just because an author says, ‘I’m not doing false equivalence,’ does not mean that the author is actually not doing false equivalence.
In conclusion, this critique is ultimately not so much about Charles as it is an attempt to point out the Right-Wing Nonsense that has infiltrated some formerly progressive communities in this new “Conspirituality” Era.
These are consequential times and we can’t afford to lose allies to Right-Wing nihilism, mendacity, and fascism.
To my currently cult-pilled brothers, sisters, and siblings—we need you!
We need you in the real world, working toward real solutions.