Prof. Rectenwald, formerly of New York University, where he had the Twitter nickname “The Deplorable Prof” has hit the circuit in the past year discussing his book, Springtime of Snowflakes, Social Justice and its Postmodern Parentage a mad cap view of what’s going down in Academia these days. His premise is universities have become hot bend of far left politics via Georg Lukacs Marxist Critical Theory that is now the main engine for Black Lives Matters and other “woke” philosophies.
Better is his next book Beyond Woke and its incubate relationship with the CIA and what and who really has the power in these relationships. Like Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom, he argues, quite successfully, that the “Big Digital” technologies and their principals like Google represent a new form of corporate state power and leftist authoritarianism. If you think this is all sour grapes, you have not been paying attention. Perhaps it is time for you to wake up while you still can.
His chart, below, is interesting in that it has an unaspected Saturn, which fits how a man who was in academia for twenty years before he caught on to what was coming down. It was only, as he relates himself, when he questioned an applicants poor writing samples for a writing position at NYU, that he realized how pervasive critical theory and political correctness had become.
Once he did, he “woke up” but not as the left expected, instead he was outraged and horrified like a Sleeping Beauty who found it was not some handsome Prince Charming who was kissing her on the cheek but some jeering half-insane joker complete with the Beetlejuice grin. For Rectenwald, that was somewhere around 57, a big shy of a second Saturn return, but nonetheless within the Grim Reaper’s grasp. Now he is Prophet Jeremiah, decrying the evils of wokeness,
Bob Murphy on his eponymous show has a good interview with Rectenwald on Beyond Woke here.
The Deplorable Chart
He has a grand trine in Earth and is a locomotive temperament type. I’ve pegged him at 05 Leo 42 for an ascendant or what E.C. Matthews calls “Fame” a degree which symbolizes often prophetic inspiration or wit and skill. This is also Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s Sun.
While I have already mentioned his unaspected Saturn in the sixth house of service, his academic career is almost a sextile away in the fifth shown by Jupiter with an opposition to his Mars in Taurus in the eleventh. This is perhaps showing that he left one type of academic for his own individualized version as it has as its T-Square the seventh house where Mercury lives — highlighting his many books as he tries to inform people of the dangers lurking within the woke movement.
His Venus in Aquarius in the eighth suggests that a daughter of his has already been ambushed by the movement, and perhaps this is a personal reason for his great agitation. I do not know but her square to Mars suggests that this is personal.
