Parents of children in the Poway, Ca., school district protest critical race theory in their schools, June 3, 2021.
A recent column written by Bonnie Jean Feldkamp of the Cincinnati Enquirer illustrates the shallow, activist-oriented mind that inhabits so many of our newsrooms and has broadly penetrated the education Borg and faculty lounges down to the elementary school a few blocks away. Critical Race Theory IS clearly, unmistakably Marxism in drag. People like Feldkamp seem to be blind to it.
Bonnie Jean Feldkamp
At issue in her piece is the parent opposition to a proposed adoption of a “social equity” course for Highlands High School in Ft. Thomas, Ky. Let’s be clear: “social equity” is a euphemism for critical race theory (CRT). The elements of CRT are at its roots, as is the moniker “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). Both apples don’t fall too far from the same tree.
Her argument in support of the class was embarrassingly incoherent. She presents the CRT-driven “social equity” course as an attempt to address “outcomes”. She writes,
“When you put the emphasis on outcomes and look at the data, it’s difficult to deny things like systemic racism and white privilege, which hits the core of the pushback on CRT, mostly from conservatives.”
That is, pure and simple, the post hoc fallacy (look below) run amok. Because slavery and Jim Crow preceded today’s lagging socio-economic numbers for African-Americans, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the former caused the latter. That’s jumping to conclusions; that’s ideology; that’s bias; that’s political activism; that’s Marxism in drag!
For the benefit of Feldkamp and CRT enthusiasts, there’s a lot that can come between 160-year-old historical circumstances and today’s crime-ridden slums. Try the War on Poverty. Try the rampant fatherlessness. Try the serial assault on traditional faith.
Try the failing inner-city public schools. Try the serial indoctrination of victimhood that strips a person of their agency. Actually, the conclusion is a baby with many fathers, least of all the one stretching back a full three hundred years.
This isn’t logic. This isn’t even serious history. This is an over-complex scheme to justify a political crusade, a campaign for a militant reverse discrimination. Thus, it is classic indoctrination when imposed on unsuspecting young minds and pushed by half-aware newspaper columnists and a few recruits from the education blob.
The missionaries for CRT, DEI, “social justice”, “social equity” are marinated in the mind of Marx. First, the cognitive monstrosity begins with a huge and unsupportable assumption: groups defined by some physical or socio-economic attribute determine the course of all of our arrangements throughout history. For Marx, it was class. For CRT’s minions, it’s race. From this hunch, it’s open-field running to the end zone of political power. The first stop along the way is to germinate an army of young activists like the child soldiers of the Khmer Rouge who marched off hundreds of thousands to the killing fields and death pits.
Khmer Rouge child soldiers at a base camp in the Cardamom Mountains of western Cambodia, north of Pailin, 8th February 1981. (Photo by Alex Bowie/Getty Images)
Her sources for her opinion are people with the same views. It’s nice to know that she has compatriots who are similarly misguided, but it’s not dispositive of anything, other than the misguided have company. She quotes Education Week Magazine, the organ of the education blob. It suffers from the overweening and smothering lefty orthodoxy of the self-proclaimed socialist John Dewey. I’ve spent 30 years of teaching in public schools and can’t recall spending more than 30 minutes perusing its pages. You learn to teach by teaching, not patterning your job around Dewey’s loopy constructivism.
People like Feldkamp try to thwart any criticism by quoting someone with “prof” before their name. Her “prof” is Phillipe Copeland of Boston University’s School of Social Work and “assistant director of narrative” for Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. He’s no more coherent than she is. The “Center” is run by the infamous CRT grifter, Ibram X. Kendi. Check out this mass of verbiage from Copeland:
“Critics cannot be satisfied because the criticism about Critical Race Theory is not being made in good faith. It is part of a systematic effort to discredit and undermine anti-racism while generating and manipulating white anxiety and resentment for political gain.”
Boston University’s Phillipe Copeland speaks at the School of Theology in 2015.
Wait a minute! He can’t, and doesn’t, prove the theory to begin with, but then rushes to condemn those who would make everyone aware of it. Now that’s a sweet gig at a tidy salary and tenure.
Parents, if you want your kids to be the next edition of the Red Guards, by all means, be my guest, but don’t complain when the world that they create looks more like today’s Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, et al.
The schools are having enough trouble successfully imparting the academic core and any pertinent vocational skills. What plausible educational or fiscal reason can excuse a foray into political activism? I don’t think that statue-toppling and spittle-laced fulminations in the face of police officers are marketable skills.
Social justice warriors in New York City, 2018.
Please read the piece if for no other reason than to know what we’re up against.
Something is in the ether or water. Call it a moment of flux. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines “flux” as “a situation in which things are changing a lot and you cannot be sure what will happen.” Also call it a our totalitarian moment. Do we really understand the gravity?
It happened so sudden. Race vengeance is taught in the schools under the call sign of “equity”. SecDef Austin is conducting a political cleansing of the ranks. Fortune 500 boardrooms have joined the pogrom. A virus is the catalyst for suspending the Bill of Rights and making America look more like Communist China, literally. The primary function of government to ensure public safety is forfeited in “reimagining policing” campaigns at the same time that sweeping controls on the private ownership of the means of self-protection are seriously considered. Under the banner of hyper-politicized “climate change”, government will confer upon itself the power to control nearly every aspect of our lives. To keep the revolutionary commissars in power, elections are to be rigged ala Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) or George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) can’t compete with this emerging reality.
SecDef Austin announces campaign to politically cleanse the ranks of “extremists”.
Pres. Biden announces more gun control measures, 2021.Radical congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey announce their Green New Deal in February 2019.Visitors at California’s Universal Studios theme park following the state’s universal masking mandate.Mailed ballots lying on the floor of a Paterson, NJ, apartment building during the 2020 election.
John Adams in 1775 once quipped, “Liberty once lost is lost forever”. I think that he was drawing upon the words of William Penn, the founder of the Pennsylvania Colony. In 1687, Penn ordered the printing of the Magna Carta and other English constitutional documents to remind generations of their English rights and liberties. He advised them:
“not to give up anything of liberty that at present they do enjoy, but take up the good example of our ancestors, and understand that it is easy to part with or give away great privileges [rights and liberties], but hard to be gained if lost.” *
In 1701, Penn issued the Charter of Privileges, and in 1751, in commemoration of it, the Assembly of Pennsylvania commissioned a great bell to be installed in Assembly Hall. Today, we call the building Independence Hall and the bell the Liberty Bell.
Oh, how are we quickly forgetting.
RogerG
*From “Albion’s Seed” by David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press.
The booking photos of, L to R, pf Rowan Dalbey, Kristen Aumoithe and Amber Lucas.
California gave to the nation mind-boggling aerospace, movies, the wonderful cornucopia of the Central Valley, and the high tech universe. Now, we must add half-literate loons to the list of exports. Weeks after the testimony of Barry Brodd, a former Santa Rosa police officer and current use-of-force expert, in support of Derek Chauvin’s defense, three women, maybe others, descended on a home in Santa Rosa thinking it was still occupied by Brodd. They vandalized the house in pig’s blood and left a pig’s head on the front porch. The only problem: the acts are felony vandalism and Brodd, like many of the retired California men and women in blue, no longer live in the state. The halfwits only ruined the sleep and property of quite innocent people.
The Santa Rosa home vandalized by the three “social justice warriors”.
The fact that Brodd no longer lives in the state says volumes. Not to say that he lives there but there is a reason for the existence of “blue Idaho”. In fact, huge colonies of Californian refugees are littered throughout the country, mostly west of the Mississippi. One reason for the exodus is the fact that the state is in the grip of people like Rowan Dalbey (20), Kristen Aumoithe (34), and Amber Lucas (34) – now charged felons. If you watch the video, you’ll get a brief backgrounder of at least one of the culprits, Lucas. She’s a “social justice warrior” and something of a wine connoisseur. The other two look like her sisters.
Take a look and you’ll get a glimpse into the mind of California’s ruling class.
Pete Buttigieg, Sec. of TransportationNew York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones talks to Hampton University about her piece The 1619 Project Wednesday November 6, 2019 at Scripps School of Journalism. (Rob Ostermaier/Daily Press)
President Biden in his first speech to Congress on April 28, 2021: “Independent experts estimate the American Jobs Plan will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars to economic growth in the years to come.”
“Experts”, it’s become a cliché, a buzzword, famous for its new-found vapidity and banality. All apply because its meaning has been soiled by media-hungry activists, politicians exploiting the moment to foist their fanatical vision on the country, and far too many technocrats and technocrat wannabes stepping outside their lane with disastrous results. The word has been stripped of its force in the language. It’s developed a darker connotation to those who happen to fall on the wrong side of the fashionable zealotry of the age.
Part of the problem lies with our misplaced faith in a technocracy, the tendency of seeing nearly all issues as if they were matters to be addressed by technical expertise. Values such as liberty, decency, self-reliance, civil society, faith, personal achievement, cultural preservation, etc., are reduced to a secondary role. Questions are reduced to mere calculation, the calculus of the technical expert.
Funny thing, though, most everyone with an animating cause or set of zealous ideological commitments desires the security from challenge that the moniker “expert” confers. Partisan, ideological crusaders seek protection from opposition under a pseudo-expertise invented for the purpose. It’s how they make their positions unassailable. The drive for paper credentials (college degrees, certification) – that staple of the expert class – is extended to cover good old-fashioned extremist provocateurs. Thus, the expert umbrella is stretched into a canopy sheltering everyone from the lab coats to the fanatical huckster.
No doubt, the pandemic has diminished the value of the word “expert”. Doctors Fauci and Birx in the previous administration, and the ubiquitous Fauci and Walensky in this one, have made “expert” a matter of scorn for many. The reputations of many “experts” are sullied when they conveniently forget their place. Policy – meaning the directions and actions of government’s decision-makers – must consider more than the physical “science” of an issue. “Science” is a necessary but not sufficient factor in developing a course of action. Certainly, it’s more at the top of the list in some matters than others. But the last time that I checked, Fauci, Birx, and Walensky aren’t Constitutional scholars, social psychologists, economists, and cultural anthropologists who understand the high priority of liberty in our society. “Science” in their hands becomes cold, hard government aggression. As one sensible pundit put it – I paraphrase – we should consult their expertise, not submit to it.
Dr.’s Fauci and Birx Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director
Speaking of submit, right now, the “science” of the “expert” is a form of Islam, in the purest definition of the Arabic word. Its literal translation is “submission”. For a Muslim, it’s submission to Allah. For our power-hungry collectivists, it’s submission to their version of “science” under the cloak of their coterie of “experts”, as if no other voices matter, so long as it produces submission to the orders of the powerful. It conjures images of conversion by the sword sweeping the Middle East to the plains of France and gates of Vienna of centuries past. Only in this case, the hardy activists in the seats of power, with their politicized “experts” in tow, are scything any opposition to their authoritarian edicts. It’s shocking to watch the overturning of the Founding by this bastardized form of “science”.
The bastardization sullies its reputation, but the interference of politics isn’t the only cause for the decline in the status of “expert”. The inherent value of the college degree – the base requirement for “expert” – has an inverse relationship to its ease of acquisition. The college degree in the ever-growing panoply of fields, in its current state of depressed value, still strives to share in the glow of a PhD in nuclear physics. In fact, PhD’s are offered in nearly everything, but without the rigor. Much of the coursework is balderdash, sophistry, or disguised ideology. Yes, ideology, as in a systematized but shallow viewpoint masquerading as a form of higher thought.
Enter “Doctor” Jill Biden, an archetype of the genre. She’s an obsessive/compulsive hoarder of degrees with two masters in reading and English and a “Doctorate” in educational leadership. Does all that time and expense in a college classroom designate competence? Maybe, maybe not, many times not. As a 30-year veteran as an instructor in public high schools and a community college, in many leadership posts, I’ve seen this breed of cat many times. With their advanced sheepskin in Education, many with the Jill accolade (Education PhD, empty awards and certificates) on their résumé, they prance before the faculty in training sessions with their alleged silver bullet for reform but can’t handle penetrating questions into their scheme. It quickly becomes obvious that their “competence” is actually a faith in a set of highly tendentious assumptions for which they are ill-prepared to defend when confronted by skeptics. They stammer, unless they stand before a staff equally in the dark. It’s an embarrassing charade.
Jill Biden, “PhD”
Don’t trust the presenter to realize the embarrassment and then expect that to be a corrective. Some are so immersed in their loose theory that they are oblivious. Some go so far as to mistake a dubious ideology for scholarship. Indeed, some manage to parlay the cognitive blur into a sweet faculty gig, like Nikole Hannah Jones, author of the discredited “The 1619 Project”, now a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. It’s easy to becloud the boundary between political dogmas and scholarship when you don’t know any better. I suspect that she doesn’t know any better.
Either she doesn’t know any better or she does but has forsaken truth-seeking for political activism. The reality is that she’s more of an advocate of a political dogma than a real scholar. Scholarship, like science, is a coherent search for truth. That’s not for her. She has built a career on the false analysis of starting with a conclusory dogmatic belief (“systemic racism”), then engages in an extrapolation from that unproven assumption (the need for “equity”), and then moves onto unfounded speculation to serve her preordained political vision (racial reparations). It’s perfect for protracted political agitation. And it’s an insult to scholarship.
Her affront to logic is astounding. As a point of comparison, the form of truth-seeking and sound logic in the field of science is the scientific method. It begins, absolutely begins, with a testable hypothesis. The proposed answer to a problem (hypothesis) must be stated in a testable manner. A person can’t start with “systemic” as a governing adjective. It’s too ill-defined to be subjected to verification. Jones’s method of thinking has more in common with the Buddhist Sutras than rigorous scientific analysis. She, like others of her ilk, simply claim a “truth” and then run with the ball.
She is part of a tribe of abusers to serious scholarship. Like them, she tries to present an ersatz proof in the form of “statistical disparities”, which are unequal socio-economic measures by demographic group. Blacks suffer a higher rate of maternal deaths for instance. Okay, now what? She jumps to her favored conclusion of “systemic racism”. But that’s not proof of a “system” disfavoring Blacks. She hasn’t even dealt with the question of whether the possible causes are external or internal to the group. That would require a legitimate process of elimination which she doesn’t even attempt, or can’t perform.
A pregnant woman looks out the window at the Robert Taylor Homes projects in Chicago. 2001.
If our “system” is a knee on the neck of Black America and a fixed competition to advance whites as Jones claims, why aren’t whites doing better? Going back to those maternal-mortality rates, whites don’t lead the pack with the smallest maternal death rate. They are tied with Asians, and Hispanics are at the head of the pack with the smallest number. When Jones bellows that she wants “white people to give up whiteness”, does she now mean that “brown people give up their brownness”?
The bankruptcy of “statistical disparities” doesn’t stop there. Average life spans by race don’t cooperate with the Jones’s hallowed belief in “systemic” white supremacy. Whites have been on a slide in longevity for a couple of decades since the onset of the opioid epidemic’s “deaths of despair”. Whites, as in maternal-mortality rates, aren’t on top in life expectancy. The peak is occupied by Asians (89), followed by Hispanics (83), and whites (79) and blacks (73) finish behind. Should “Asians give up their Asianness”?
She gets away with it because she, like her prototype, Jill Biden, has buried the incompetence in a layer of sheepskin and paper in the form of awards from organizations that are equally as corrupted by the fashionable political manias of our time. Corruption begets corruption.
It extends to the academy that hired her, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. A freebooting activist like Jones, masquerading as a scholar, will face many journalism students who avoided the rigor of an academic core, maybe like her. The School removed the requirements for Econ 101 (basic econ principles and concepts), History 128 (US History, 1865 to present), and Poli Sci 100/101 (US government/state and local government). Forget about any expectation of any learning in Western Philosophy and Civilization, and Logic. They are primed for her nonsense.
The core can be dodged by adhering to a curriculum more attuned to political activism in courses such as “Defining Blackness” (African Studies 50), “Environmentalism and American Society” (Anthro 51), “Collective Leadership Models for Community Change” (Comm 53), “Supernatural Encounters” (Rel 246), and “Emotion and Social Life” (Soc 51). See where Biden’s extra four years of taxpayer-funded education in his “American Families Plan” leads? It heads straight to academic charlatans like Jones, transcripts littered with radical infatuations of the moment, and an untrained and empty head ready to fill slots in the newsroom at The New York Times.
And just think that the Jones brigades of critical race theory (CRT) are spreading into your kids’ primary and secondary schools. Yeah, the schools down the street. “Equity” is CRT’s cover for the use of statistical disparities to force a levelling. That means in today’s doublespeak that your kids, if they are white or white enough, are going to go through Maoist struggle sessions to force them to admit their role of oppressor. Take for instance , the Inclusion and Equity officer for the mostly white Hamilton Southeastern School District, northeast of Indianapolis.
Rosalie Nataki Pettigrew
She promises an eternal crusade for “equity”. She boasts, “You’re on a journey but you never arrive, you get closer [to equity], but you never really get there. It’s continued work, it doesn’t stop, because I think the moment that we stop is the moment that old systems can come back.” The poor kids are being set up to get an unending dose of this lefty indoctrination, or until parents get wise and yank their kids out of this ideological hothouse.
If you’re looking for the clean-cut, button-downed alternative in your “expert”, not the kind in college faculty posts that give birth to the Marxist hoods manning the BLM or Antifa barricades in our big cities, you’ll turn to the bland representatives of McKinsey & Company, a multi-national consultancy operation. Here you’ll find the morally, but appropriately certificated, empty suit. McKinsey puts a premium on the prestigious paper, prestigious degree, from the prestigious university. Pedigree matters more than moral depth. They’ll even take those Humanities majors. From there, McKinsey alumni frequently gravitate to government or to the heavily bureaucratized Fortune 500.
A younger Pete Buttigieg as a McKinsey whiz kid.
No better example can be found of the McKinsey Associate in government than our first gay Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg. The callousness of the tone-deaf empty suit can be seen in this exchange between Sen. Ted Cruz and Buttigieg on Biden’s order to cancel the Keystone pipeline:
Cruz: “So for those workers, the answer is somebody else will get a job?”
Buttigieg: “The answer is we are very eager to see those workers continue to be employed in good-paying union jobs, even if they might be different ones.”
“Different ones”? Once you kill 11,000 jobs, Buttigieg and the rest of the gang over at Biden central can’t guarantee the avoidance of economic despair for the 11,000 now having to resort to unemployment benefits. He can’t wrap his head around the human cost of playing the demi-god with the lives of others.
The mindset around Biden, including Buttigieg’s, is a military one. The workforce is a mass of cogs in a machine who are treated like grunts in the Army, ready to be shunted around as needed. For the Buttigieg types, highly specialized welders are a number to be moved from one column to another in their Excel spreadsheets. Indeed, it’s as simple as Excel to our Harvard and Oxford-trained alumnus of McKinsey and Company. Flesh and blood, personal aspirations, and family welfare be damned for this disconnected careerist. It’s shallow thinking at its harshest and worst.
John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace to explain the troubling outcomes of the Carthaginian peace at Versailles in 1919. Keynes followed the academic script by clinically focusing on the economic consequences, but at least he was aware of serious fallout from the decisions made at Versailles. Buttigieg is also probably aware, but seems not to care. For him, he thinks that he can add another field to his Excel federal spending spreadsheet for a retraining program for defunct workers in defunct-by-edict jobs. He hits the enter key and it’s off to the gym as if “problem solved”.
McKinsey-style aloofness, almost callousness, isn’t due to the lack of goals. If anything, this suit is all about goals in his means-ends analysis. However – and I paraphrase James Carville – it’s the goals, stupid. In this manner, he’s like our newest faculty member at UNC-Chapel Hill. Both take a tendentious claim – Jones’s “systemic racism”, apocalyptic climate change for Buttigieg – and run to its mitigation no matter the destroyed livelihoods and ruinous ramifications from their suicidal jihad against the whole of the American way of life. For Jones, it’s “burn baby burn”. For Buttigieg, it’s a cold calculus toward dubious ends. Both will burn down the house.
America is in the grip of a death cult, one that originated on the campus and spread to big philanthropy, the Fortune 500, big sports, and the big-moneyed class in trendy places. The cult is partly populated by a compromised and myopic claque of experts, too many of them caught up in a fanaticism-of-the-moment and cruising way out of their lane. Others in the sect have the accoutrements of “expert” (a degree) but, in reality, are revolutionary firebrands. It’s as if we have created for ourselves a pseudo-technocracy gone mad, or, more specifically, gone woke.
House Democratic Party leaders: Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Jerry Nadler.
Today, we might be sensing the whiff of the kind of social decay that earlier laid open the ancient classical world to Christianity. A fatigued civilization, for whatever reason, can’t generate the resistance to something else filling the void. In the Greco-Roman world, the emptiness was filled with the beauty of Christianity. In our own time, it’s the onrush of the vile postmodernism and its depraved cousin, critical race theory, that is attempting to displace Christianity. The elites of all stations get caught up in the mania for this latest new thing, even if it is a moral and logical mess. We are entering a really dark place. Yet, hope lies in the fact that we’ve had trials before, and Christianity has proven to be remarkably resilient.
Sparse attendance at an United Methodist Church.
The current decline of Christianity in modern America is stunning. A Pew survey of American religiosity from 2019 shows the dire situation in just 10 years. In a nutshell, adherents of Catholicism and Protestantism are down (51% to 43%), and agnosticism, “nothing in particular”, and atheists are up . . . in just 10 years! Plowing the field deeper, the drops are most significant among those in the East, the college-educated, Democrats, and the young, with Millennials taking first place among the youthful disaffiliated. Nothing about his should be surprising if you’ve followed the culture.
The decline can be traced to the failure of our institutions. Marriage has been redefined into a near oblivion with easy no-fault divorce, thereby leaving behind a tranche of emotionally-scarred children. The schools, in an effort to maintain religious neutrality by bleaching any hint of God from the curriculum, are training grounds for materialism (the material world is all that there is). The family provides no corrective since it has been incubated in the singular quest for material pleasure. The state reinforces the materialism by the transformation of its core mission into the nation’s nanny. All it can do is affect a person’s material condition, not their spirit or soul, if you will. In the end, the ever-expansive state crowds out the church and its essential social mission. It’s more and more a world without God.
The experience of the 20th century shows that the displacement of God tends to lead to the emplacement of man in His place. God goes down the memory hole and man gets deified. The deification occurs in the sanctification of the words of certain trendy persons. Their words are worshipped like Moses receiving the Commandments from the burning bush. They require no proof for their validity. They are simply announced and off to the barricades the zealots go.
The new gospel is postmodernism. It rejects a single, overarching truth, and makes all claims of truth to be dependencies of who and what is in power. Truth isn’t objective; it’s relative to those in a position to impose it. The problem: it justifies a skepticism of all claims and ends in a belief in nothing. A person under its sway will be forever in a state of second-guessing themselves. They end up where G.K. Chesterton found them:
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
The “anything” could be modern “critical race theory”, “systemic racism”, or the neo-Marxism rampaging in the streets of Portland, anything put forward by anyone with a platform and power to push it. So, a philosophical movement meant to question power comes around to being a chief exponent of it: power in its most crass expression.
Herbert Marcuse
Enter Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse, an acolyte of the Frankfurt School (Institute of Social Research) in Germany, took the oppressor/oppressed dialectic of Marx and postmodernism’s chaining of truth to power to concoct the “critical theory” of today’s “critical race theory” (CRT). In Marcuse, the consciousness bit is hyped to present truth, and our awareness of the truth, to be a product of our power position in society. The powerful – the “privileged” in CRT – can be defined by race, gender, ethnicity, any one of a number of materially-based categories. Your consciousness – your values, intentions, beliefs, your head – is locked in place by your melanin count, et al. If you fall into the lighter side of the color spectrum, for example, you can say nothing to deny your “privilege” – code for power. You are as guilty as the darker pigments are founts of wisdom since they are deemed “oppressed”. Logic, reason, the scientific method, and any prior civilizational core tenet cannot be allowed to contravene the yapping of the race-hustlers on MSNBC, The View, the streets of Minneapolis, or the Democratic Party’s big cheeses. After all, their “truth” is covered by the claim that they give voice to the voiceless, a banality in common use in such circles.
If you haven’t noticed, their contradictory circular logic leads them back to a power grab to impose a “truth”. The whole thing is a hot mess, and a dangerous one at that.
LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers
What happens when the oppressors and oppressed switch roles: the oppressed become the oppressors? Of course, all of this is nonsense. Most single moms in a crime-ridden slum aren’t storming a Baltimore Target. The barking is coming from multi-millionaires and billionaires like Oprah or LeBron James, or a host of others of the oppressed-by-skin-color who have estates on Martha’s Vineyard and attended elite prep schools. The skin-color matrix breaks down as the new “privileged” take on the mantle of Lenin’s vanguard elite. In the end, we’ve got a new slate of “oppressors” as the consciousness bit is weaponized to crush opposition. The new “truth” that is not beholden to logic, law, the scientific method, math, or reason is set loose with no barrier to its realization. Are you sensing a whiff of totalitarianism?
Maxine Waters (D, Ca.)
Maxine Waters (D, Ca.) cavorts to Minneapolis to incite street extortion for her preferred verdict, and shouts “shut your mouth” to Rep. Jim Jordan (R, Oh.). Mazie Hirono (D, Ha.) goes before cameras to demand that men “Just shut up” if they attempt to prevent her from performing a career lynching of Brett Kavanaugh. Biden and Harris jump to cameras after the Chauvin verdict to announce a crusade against “systemic racism” without a shred of logic, reason, or evidence to justify the inquisition. Biden turns loose the powers of the federal authorities to indoctrinate the young in the contemptible “critical race theory” by reversing Trump’s order to stop the mental devastation in the federal government. Things are happening that should send chills down your spine, and all because some suburbanites had angst about Trump’s comportment.
Yep, elections have consequences, and many of them are hellish. The period between the present and the 2022 elections is a race, a race to see how much damage the New-Left-in-Democrat-clothes can inflict on the country before they are stopped in a vote of the people. The political charlatans currently running the show have a window of opportunity for them to unwittingly push the country into a major rupture. If they are successful in DC in ramming through their revolution, there’s too much of the rest of the country that won’t abide by it.
Ironically, states and cities under the sway of the New Left showed the way for red states who wish not to join their revolution. Leftists in power declared their jurisdictions to be sanctuary cities and states for illegal immigrants. As per blue states, red states are forming an expanding list of Second Amendment sanctuary states. Disunion, if it does happen, began with the Left’s flaunting of the clear Constitutional federal authority over immigration and may end with the two-thirds of the other states whose citizens don’t wish to be remain in a union with states who are striving to relegate them to second-class political status.
Gabrielle Clark, mother of the 12th-grader, who is suing her school and district for the imposition of critical race theory curriculum.
More pushback is germinating. Critical race theory’s totalitarian indoctrination is being challenged in court and before school boards. Examples are many. A father publicly pulled his daughter out of Brearley, an elite $54,000 per year New York private school for propaganda acts such as a school-sponsored student “Anti-racism pledge”. He says the school’s antiracism actions were “misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous”. Gabrielle Clark, mother of a twelfth-grader in a Nevada charter school, filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada in December 2020. In her complaint, her son’s school “inserted consciousness raising and conditioning exercises under the banner of ‘Intersectionality’ and ‘Critical Race Theory.’” Further, “The lesson categorized certain racial and religious identities as inherently ‘oppressive,’ . . . and instructed pupils including [her son] who fell into these categories to accept the label ‘oppressor.’” This is Khmer Rouge stuff, and happening all over the country, and likely to intensify as the full resources of the federal government are brought to bear in service of the jihad.
How much more can the union endure? These are tumultuous times. May cooler heads prevail.
A possibility?
RogerG *Thanks for the informational contributions and insights of Peter J. Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute, Bari Weiss, former New York Times editor, and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book, Cynical Theories.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., speaks as Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, listens on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 20, 2021, after the jury returned guilty verdicts on all three charges in the murder trial of former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Good public leaders don’t attempt to ride a wave of falsehoods. Right now, our mediocre leadership does! Take today’s enthusiasm for race-hustling among many of our elected leaders at the top of our political establishment. The whole edifice of “critical race theory” and its companion charge of “systemic racism” rides on a blatant mangling of facts, inventing them in many instances. The George Floyd case has turned into another example in the sorry saga.
Universal connectivity now makes it possible for cat videos, daily cop interactions with the public, and acts of rank stupidity to spread like the 1906 San Francisco Fire in the immediate wake of the 7.9 earthquake. Back then, fire-storms rampaged almost unimpeded, like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Today, fire-storms are limited to wildlands; however, another kind is let loose on the public. Under conditions of instant connectivity, everyone gets to see what somebody else has taken with their cellphone, and frequently, before it has a chance to go virile, someone will have cropped it to fit a crazed political fetish. Sadly, not unexpectedly, it happened again regarding the arrest of George Floyd.
Watch the video below of the prologue to the famous 9-minute Chauvin segment that was hyped by our race-hustling halfwits in elected positions. I’ve said it before: resisting arrest increases the risk of an encounter ending in a bad place. Add the facts of the suspect being high as a kite, universal cell-phone cinematography, and near-illiterate revolutionary fervor of a narrow clique running at a fever pitch, and we get to see our cities explode.
Does anyone do real risk assessment anymore? Many of our leaders go overboard into authoritarianism to pursue zero risk because of a virus, but find excuses for resisting arrest as if the risk of refusing to follow officer requests is negligible in the haste to brand cops as covert KKK members. Little risk is permissible in one while high-risk behavior is ignored in the other. How does that work?
Do we produce good leaders anymore who can sensibly navigate the nonsense? If we don’t find some soon, get prepared for a major rupture in our national cohesion. Red-state locales won’t countenance the craziness that appears to ride at the top of our society.
Have you noticed the pervasive use of “systemic racism” and “equity” in public utterances by eminences in our society? The two are key elements of “critical race theory”, an idea akin to Marx’s Scientific Socialism.
Honestly, the terms are a real head-scratcher to most sensible people. The former (systemic racism) is assumed to be real and bad, and the latter (equity) carries a vague aura of something good, being phonetically similar to “equality”. The reality is that both are warmed-over Marxisms, Marxisms for the obsessive identity-mongering of our time. It’s the oppressed/oppressor schtick of Marxism with the ranks of the “oppressed” filled with “people of color”, women (however defined), and that catch-all, the “other”. The “oppressors” are those of a pale shade and male. Notice that personal actions have nothing to do with the assignation.
You are judged by melanin count and genitalia. Sounds like good old fashioned racism and sexism to me, just practiced by different people.
Anyway, all of this is nonsense since racial intermingling has a made a hash of “people of color”. Soon, the only people reasonably without color are those at room temperature.
“Equity” began in English common law as the means to fill in the gaps, address loopholes, and to realize the goals of the common law: fairness and justice. The spirit-of-the-law stuff, as opposed to the letter.
That ain’t true today! It has the rancid odor of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It’s the century-plus bid to force equality in the strictest terms possible among the preferred categories (above).
Acts of public shaming during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Virtual reality training in a business conference room to identify and correct for “systemic racism”. (Photo: Forbes)
What does this mean to the common American as this noxious ideology embeds itself into everything from the Fortune 500 to the schools, especially the schools? Munchkins in elementary schools are asked to demean themselves in rankings of racial “power and privilege” (Cupertino, Ca.). During a middle school teacher in-service (i.e., training), a shaming session is conducted for Christian white males to confess their “privilege” – aka, “sin” – and admit their oppression of the “other” (Springfield, Mo.). Fifth-graders are compelled to celebrate “Black communism” and engage in a protest to free 1960’s radical Angela Davis who was, by the way, charged with murder (Philadelphia). In Seattle, the school district administration issued a memo that described white teachers as guilty of “spirit murder” of black children. Think, this totalitarian indoctrination is happening to your children and the people teaching them.
This isn’t education; it’s child abuse!
Ibram X. Kendi, formerly known as Ibram Henry Rogers, the warlock of critical race theory mysticism, demands a federal Antiracism Department, independent of the elective branches. No homage to popular sovereignty for this guy.
It’s just the tip of the iceberg. The abuse to logic and decency is evident everywhere from the military academies, the Pentagon, the labyrinth of state, local, and federal governments, corporate HR departments, et al. Just like the prior Marxisms, this one will end up in another pathetic existence for the people forced to live under it.
And you were worried about Trump’s comportment in 2020? Waiting in the wings is something far more horrifying, whether you realized it or not.
In 1917, many Russians didn’t like the czar. Then, they helped overthrow him and eventually got Lenin, Stalin, and communist totalitarianism for about 80 years. 10-12 million deaths later (due to civil war, famine, mass executions, and state-sanctioned murder) Russians got what few wanted at the onset.
Be careful for what you ask for. You are about to live the consequences. Here’s a photo gallery of one of the consequences, using the example of Minneapolis:
Onlookers watch as smoke smolders from a destroyed fast food restaurant near the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct, Thursday, May 28, 2020, after a night of rioting and looting as protests continue over the death of George Floyd. (Photo: AP Photo/Jim Mone) People stand on a burned up car as fires burn near a Target Store after a night of unrest and protests in the death of George Floyd early Thursday, May 28, 2020 in downtown Minneapolis. (Photo: David Joles/Star Tribune via AP)A man poses for a photo in the parking lot of an AutoZone store in flames, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via AP)A man poses for photos in front of a fire at an AutoZone store, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via AP)People break into a Target store, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP)People get out of a Target store with merchandise, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP)A man, center, sorts for items left in grocery carts strewn in the Target parking lot near the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct, Thursday, May 28, 2020, following a night of rioting and looting as protests continue over the arrest of George Floyd who died in police custody. (Photo: AP Photo/Jim Mone)
