90-Year-Old Woman Fired by Woke Mob
Fran Itkoff is the latest casualty in a war that has been underway for more than a century.
I have known several people with multiple sclerosis—friends, family, and acquaintances. Some are (and were) very close and dear to me. It is a pernicious disease, and as you might imagine, I have donated money to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society to assist them in fighting it.
That, of course, put me on their mailing list.
In the summer of 2023, their seasonal magazine arrived in our mailbox. On the cover was a trans woman, with a headline implying that trans people with MS suffer extra impediments in getting the care they need.
Was the headline’s claim true? It’s hard to say, given that it is impossible to trust anything that any mainstream entity says on the trans issue…or on any other, for that matter. They are constantly making things up: warping statistics, elevating garbage “studies” to the status of dogma, or simply creating KnownFacts™ out of whole cloth.
Of course, the truth of the headline was not the point. Showing a picture of a trans person was the point. In an era where nearly every mainstream entity must, at some point, burnish its woke credentials on the topic of trans people, this magazine cover was inevitable. I recognized it as such right away.
I also have people close to me who are trans, so I have at least some insight into that world. But my post today has nothing to do with trans people. What people do with their own money, time, and bodies ought to be their business. It only becomes our business when they try to make us pay for it, attempt forcibly to alter our behavior or speech, or force it on our children. (All of which is happening throughout Western civilization, unfortunately.)
My point, rather, is about the reality of mainstream institutions in 2024. In a nutshell: they’re all compromised. A quick look at history explains why…
Back in the 19th century, a split opened up on the left. Some felt that leftism must be imposed on a nation suddenly and completely, through violent revolution (Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pot, et al). Others believed that Western nations could be taken over gradually.
Of this latter group, some, like Eduard Bernstein, wanted to use the mechanisms available in Western democracies to “reform” them in a leftward direction, slowly and peacefully. Others—Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács chief among them—favored a “war of position,” in which the institutions of a nation are slowly undermined until they crumble, leaving the nation vulnerable to an eventual kinetic “war of maneuver,” in which the revolutionary left takes over.
These latter “Western Marxists” believed that the institutions of the West—capitalism, religion, baseball, apple pie, etc.—were addling the workers’ brains, blinding them to the truth of their terrible plight. These were the wealthiest workers, with the highest living standards humans had ever achieved, up to that point. This meant that the Western left was going to have to work extra hard to convince them to deny the truth of their own eyes and see how oppressed they actually were.
To this end, they launched what one of Lukács’ students coined “the long march through the institutions.” They were going to have to take over every organization and field of endeavor. They were going to have to co-opt all the mechanisms of information dissemination. Once this task was complete, they would be able to convince a comparatively free and happy people that they are actually miserable victims.
Are you starting to recognize where we are now? “Woke” is not some thing that just cropped up ten years ago. Woke is the culmination of a plan that has been in the works for 100 years.
If any organization ought to be apolitical, it is the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. As far as I know, MS does not check to see if you are proletariat or bourgeoisie, left or right, purple or orange. But no organization can be apolitical. The Long March must claim them all. That the National Multiple Sclerosis Society would eventually put out a magazine cover showing a trans woman with MS (and other intersectionality points), and making victimhood claims on her behalf, was inevitable.
(As an aside…The other metrics of intersectionality did not even occur to me at first. The person on that cover is not only trans with MS, but also black and elderly. The most generous estimate of the percent of the population who are truly trans is about .003. People with MS = ~.03. Black population in the U.S. = ~.12. Over 65 = ~.17. I am not a statistician, but don’t you multiply these to get the percent of the population that would be in all of these cohorts? If so, the person on that cover represents .0000018 of the population. [NB: Northern European whites, and (cis)women, are actually more likely to get MS than other cohorts.])
Still, when you see an entity signaling its woke credentials on the trans issue, you can still reasonably ask yourself if
A) they are a normal entity doing it to keep up with the general zeitgeist, or out of fear of the woke mob, or
B) they have actually been fully taken over.
A couple of weeks ago, we got our answer. The story is in the video at the end of this post, but in brief…the National Multiple Sclerosis Society fired a 90-year-old woman who had been volunteering for 60 years…for simply asking a question about pronouns. The NMSS had made it a requirement that everyone working for them display their pronouns, and this elderly woman—not particularly well-versed on the requirements imposed by our woke overlords—simply did not understand. For that, they fired her.
A 90-year-old woman. After 60 years of service. Wrap your minds around that. And then ask yourself—do these people actually care about MS at all? Or is the NMSS simply one more organization pursuing goals laid out by Marxists who have been dead for almost a century, and then doing whatever else it does as a secondary byproduct?
Fran Itkoff was born right around the time when Western Marxists were planning their “long march through the institutions.” Now, here, near the end of her long life, she has become one of its many victims.
Here is a glimpse into the history that has led to this point, from my book The Freedom Scale: An Accurate Measure of Left and Right:
I know two trans people, both in their twenties snd the idea entered their heads in the early 2010 when they were kids. Both women transitioning to men. One friend who is like a daughter to me transitioned back to a woman. Now she’s back to being a man again. My tax payer money is funding this ridiculous education. More and more often I see kids now being homeschooled. Now I know why.
All these organizations are raising money for big Pharma companies which is the only thing they see as valid healthcare. I volunteered for the ALZ foundation for a while and saw they were just trying to fund drug research.