This is an expanded and revised version of a post from February. The changes generally fall into three areas; (1) additional liberal/progressive/socialists I am reading who oppose Critical Race Theory in all its varied forms; (2) reorganizing the list by separating those primarily concerned with race from the growing squad of those, primarily feminists, fighting the transgender mob, and (3) additional explanatory materials.
Going forward I'm going to use this post as a collection point for additional relevant materials, so you will see references and links that postdate this, along with occasional reminders on a monthly basis of its existence.
". . . stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I
must think and feel about myself. Stop presuming to know who I am or
what my culture is based upon my skin color. Stop asking me to project
stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on their skin color.” - Jodi Shaw
This post focuses on the ideological struggle that is the #1 priority for our
country today; defeating Critical Race/Social Justice Theory (CRT) aka The New Racism (1), a
subject I've written frequently about in the Your Future series.
This morally corrupt ideology continues to sweep through American
institutions, and is now being promoted as a top priority by the new
administration. If successful, it spells the end of a nation based on
tolerance and the acceptance that we can be one country even while
containing a multitude of viewpoints and backgrounds. For those of us
who have always promoted
equality under the law, removing discriminatory barriers, and
encouraging and welcoming true diversity in our workplaces and lives,
what is unfolding around us is a disaster that was unthinkable a few
years ago.
There is a growing
community of liberals/progressives who understand the illiberal nature
of the threat posed by CRT to the continuance of America as a democracy and to the
core values of freedom of speech, conscience, and equal treatment under
the laws. This is extremely important because it is only if effective
opposition grows across the political spectrum that this
threat can be defeated because so many of our institutions - academia,
media, the federal bureaucracy, the tech companies and many other
corporations, NGOs - are dominated by the left.
The totalitarian nature of this assault on our society is demonstrated by its intolerance of any dissent and continuous efforts to deplatform, censor, and deny job, career and educational opportunities to its opponents, efforts which have caused many to self-censor themselves.(1a) As Andrew Sullivan has noted:
This is what makes CRT different. When it began, critical theory was
one school of thought among many. But the logic of it — it denies the
core liberal premises of all the other schools and renders them all
forms of oppression — means that it cannot long tolerate those other
schools. It must always attack them.
Critical theory is therefore
always the cuckoo in the academic nest. Over time, it throws out its
competitors — and not in open free debate. It does so by ending that
debate, by insisting that the liberal “reasonable person” standard of
debate is, in fact, rigged in favor of the oppressors, that speech is a
form of harm, even violent harm, rather than a way to seek the truth.
Every time a liberal institution hires or fires someone because of their
group identity rather than their individual abilities, it is embracing a
principle designed to undermine the liberal part of the institution.
Every university that denies a place to someone because of their race is
violating fundamental principles of liberal learning. Every newspaper
and magazine that fires someone for their sincerely-held views, or
because their identity alone means those views are unacceptable, is
undermining the principles of liberal discourse. Every time someone
prefers to trust someone’s subjective “lived experience” over facts,
empiricism and an attempt at objectivity, liberal society dies a
little.
It is to insist that we can do better — within a self-correcting,
open liberal system — without surrendering to tribalism, race
obsessiveness, or utopian attempts to force racial justice which violate the core guardrails against tyranny we rely upon for the survival of liberal democracy.
This
debate is not about whether you are a racist or an antiracist. The
debate is about whether, in your deepest heart and soul, you are a
liberal or an anti-liberal. And of those two options, I have no doubt
where I stand. Do you?
It was sobering to watch a recent interview with Yeonmi Park. Park and her family grew up in North Korea suffering starvation and imprisonment until escaping to China when she was 13 in 2006. She endured more brutality in China before reaching Korea and then the United States where she obtained a scholarship to Columbia which initially thrilled her and from where she graduated in 2020. In her interview she said she learned, when faced with a race and gender based curriculum, to once again to self-censor herself and that she would never let her child get a liberal arts education at an American university because it reminded her too much of the societies from which she escaped. Her conclusion? "This is a suicidal civilization". (2)
As
liberal criminal defense lawyer Scott Greenfield recently wrote,
referring to liberals who failed over the years to resist this trend:
They should have said no at the outset and not empowered the woke
into believing that they ran the show, but they believed it would pass,
the woke would grow up and recognize their childish ideas. That, of
course, hasn’t happened, and it wasn’t just some dumb college kids doing
typically dumb kid stuff. And a lot of people have been hurt by it.
It’s
going to be a lot harder now, after so much of the intellectual
infrastructure of society has been bastardized in an effort to placate
the woke, to call bullshit and end it. But if we don’t put away the
guilt and grow some guts, the damage may be unfixable. People may not be
guilty for society’s historic transgressions, but we will be guilty for
the cowardly failure to put an end to it.
Below
are some of these liberals/progressives (a couple might characterize
themselves as centrists and there even a couple of self-described
socialists) you can find on Twitter(3)
and, through them, links to longer articles and examples of the insanity that has been unleashed. Because of their
background and beliefs they provide valuable insight on the growing
intolerance of the Woke Left and how to combat it. Most are Americans,
with a sprinkling of Aussies and Brits (all of the Anglosphere is under
assault from Left Totalitarians). Almost all of the Americans strongly
opposed Trump and voted for Biden in the hope that his reputed
moderation would temper the onslaught of CRT, a hope now dashed as I will explain in a follow up post. Some of them were professional pundits and writers before this (like Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan), others were little known and only became public after they were assaulted and expelled (such as Jenny Holland, Jodi Shaw, Grace, Colin Wright). On policy, I differ with most of them; with some I find hardly any other agreement other than on CRT and I don't always agree with their proposed solutions to the problem, but we are all united on the threat it poses to an open and free society.(4)
I've separated this list into two categories; (1) those primarily focused on race and (2) those primarily focused on transgender issues:
RACE
Andrew Sullivan (purged from NY
Magazine for being insufficiently Woke; "And so our unprecedentedly multicultural, and multiracial
democracy is now described as a mere front for 'white supremacy'"),
Wesley Yang ("I am investigating how feelings of aggrievement and resentment have been
leveraged by a new kind of activist movement deploying novel methods --
the subornation of truth-seeking institutions through the weaponizing
of claims of psychic injury in pursuit of broad new regulatory powers
over the conduct of daily life -- on behalf of an agenda that I regard
as threatening to many of the values I think are essential to
co-existence within diversity, to the integrity of truth-seeking, and
indeed, to the psychic well-being of those who take up the cause itself,
which encourages the very grievances it uses as fuel for its pursuit of
power.")
Zaid Jilani ("the left has replaced social liberalism with social control", "The portion of people who view their race as defining them declined a
lot during the 20th century, coinciding with a big decline in implicit
and explicit bias. These folks really looked at that and said we want to
crank it up again?")
John McWhorter ("The
big question about The Elect is not how to get through to them (usually
impossible) but how to keep them from taking over and destroying lives"),
Bari Weiss (purged from the NY Times
for being insufficiently Woke; "We all know something morally grotesque is swallowing liberal America"; read 'Spirit Murder', Neo-Segregation and Science Denial in American Schools),
Seerut K Chawla ("the woke believe 'language creates reality', which is why 'problematic' ideas must be censored & not heard"),
Inaya Folarin Iman ("The
end of 'woke' thinking may, in part, come from the exhaustion of its
followers. It requires self-destructive levels of emotionalism to
sustain itself"),
Mike Nayna ("it becomes necessary to depersonalize the 'enemies of Society' in order to transform the official lie into truth" quoting Aldous Huxley),
Colin Wright ("It's
shocking how badly critical theory bungles everything it touches. On
important issues of race, sex, biology, medicine, etc, it reliably
produces the most flawed conclusions and morally corrupt prescriptions
imaginable"),
Chloe S Valdary ("The
problem is that so many are looking at people of color as symbols for
certain ideas instead of full-fleshed individuals. But I'm not an idea,
I'm not a symbol or a figment of your imagination. I'm a human being."),
Peter Boghossian ("If
organizational diversity and inclusion were about removing barriers so
that minorities can succeed, I'd be an ardent supporter. But
'diversity' and 'inclusion' are not about that"). Boghossian recently resigned as Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University, "the more I spoke out against the illiberalism that has swallowed PSU, the more retaliation I faced". You can read more at My University Sacrificed Ideas For Ideology So Today I Quit.
Wokal Distance ("Don't
you ever let any of these people ever pretend that they are honest.
They make no effort to give people charitable reading and then use
uncharitable reading to justify smear jobs"),
Glenn Loury (read Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality in America),
Michael Tracey ("The
most disturbing thing about this radically expanded definition of
'harm' is that some portion of the people claiming to be 'harmed' by
anodyne utterances of words probably are being sincere - their psyches
really are that fragile. And they are attaining positions of power"),
Geoff Shullenberger ("One
right to work argument has long been that union dues, which can be
funneled towards causes and candidates beyond the immediate interests of
members, are coerced speech. Now it seems a pro-union position is 'lol
of course being in the union means total ideological agreement!"),
Ayishat Akanbi ("If
you are convinced that one racial group has a monopoly on wickedness,
then historically, you wouldn't have been hard to convince that some
races were evil"),
Samuel Kronen ("I
think systemic racism is a vague concept, white privilege an unhelpful
one, and cultural appropriation an objectively good thing. I may be
wrong, but I am normal, and anyone concerned with creating a better
world will have to engage with people like me without name-calling", and read Is Critical Race Theory un-American?),
Thomas Chatterton Williams (on the new Chicago commission to review statutes including those of Lincoln, "What
is there to 'review' about statutes of Abraham Lincoln? If there can't
be statutes of Lincoln we're essentially saying there can't be statutes
at all. He saved our country and died for it. What has anyone else
done?")
Scott Greenfield, quoted above, who also blogs at Simple Justice ("As has become abundantly clear, the gravest enemies of progressives
aren’t conservatives, Republicans or white supremacists, but liberals
who offer a more viable, realistic, free and less hateful path toward
achieving many of the same goals. Authoritarians hate the competition".)
Bo Winegard ("His
views on race and sex . . . are likely as far from reality as
imaginable, but since they cohere with the views of woke elites, we
don't and won't hear much about how far from reality Biden is")
Brett Weinstein (purged from Evergreen State College for teaching evolutionary biology),
The Woke Temple ("I
endeavor to present the teaching of Woke Ideology & Critical Race
Theory objectively and accurately using their scholars' own words.")
Obaid Omer ("I left Islam for liberal values. Now Woke liberals are embracing a new religion. To even question the extent to which racism was everywhere resulted in accusations of being a racist.
I couldn't help but notice there was an almost fundamentalist, faith-like aspect to these claims.")
Lee Jussim ("Leftwing Authoritarianism has 3 manifestations:
Dogmatic intolerance of opponents;
Willingness to censor opponents;
Endorsement of violence, bullying, social vigilantism.") You can also find his blog at Psychology Today.
David Berstein ("If no other society has achieved the kind of equity these critics demand of America, perhaps such results are not achievable, at least in the here and now")
Grace (She and her husband started a justice-oriented non-profit for training lay people as trauma care providers around the world, until the Woke attempted a takeover of their organization which you can read about here, "If you don’t fight this nonsense now, wherever it’s showing up in your community, there’ll be nothing good, true, or beautiful to defend soon. We will be ruled by lies and power while being told we’re progressing toward truth and justice.")
Erec Smith (a black professor of rhetoric, he writes "Right now, on a rhetoric listserv (WPA-L), a POC is being attacked for having an opinion unbecoming of a person of color by both whites and POC. What's worse, his bullies are claiming that THEY are the ones being bullied. How does one know when an academic field is beyond saving?")
Free Black Thought ("a group of citizens amplifying heterodox black voices rarely heard in the mainstream")
@Rhetors_of_York w/ @Tracinski:https://t.co/4rbsMVP38B pic.twitter.com/CCCsqXxONZ
— Free Black Thought (@FreeBlckThought) September 4, 2021
Clifton Duncan ("I took the labels "Liberal" and "Atheist" out of my bio.
I realized I was clinging to these labels and, in a sense, indulging in the very tribalism I rail against.
At this point I don't care what you call yourself.
It really doesn't matter.
Just be a cool human.
That's it.")
Kat ("This
religion of Social Justice has been very persuasive because it offers
only two possible (personal) reasons for disagreement:
Stupidity (so educate yourself), or
Immorality (so be excommunicated)
They're fear tactics, one of the best things to do is say no and laugh.")
Jenny Holland ("'Analytic framework' is bureaucrat-ese for thought policing.")
Shant Mesrobian ("The point of wokeness is to create racial division. It is a self-fulfilling ideology. Woke people crave racial strife more than anyone else. It gives them meaning and purpose. It creates the kind of society they pretend to be fighting against.")
Christopher Lasch's Angry Ghost ("A certain visceral horror in watching the political orientation and milieu you’ve always identified with collapsing into fundamentalism; beliefs mutating into unshakable faiths; friends becoming zealots—a reign of synchronised unreason convinced that it epitomises rationality.")
Leighton Woodhouse (Read When The Crime Wave Hits Your Family)
Also recommended is Helen Pluckrose (on Twitter) and Counterweight,
the organization she and others recently founded in the UK (but also
providing services in America) with this mission statement
We are here to provide you with practical information and expert
guidance to resist the imposition of the ideology that calls itself
“Critical Social Justice” on your day-to-day life. Our primary focus is
on people who find themselves in situations where they need to push back
at this ideology in their place of work, university, children’s school
or elsewhere and defend their right to their own ethical frameworks for
opposing prejudice and discrimination. We connect you with the specific
resources, advice and guidance your particular situation requires. The
Counterweight community is a non-partisan, grassroots movement
advocating for liberal concepts of social justice that include
individualism, universalism, viewpoint diversity and the free exchange
of ideas.
Counterweight has been overwhelmed by requests
for help since it launched last week. Under the Biden Administration
such an organization is even more relevant.
Of special
note is Asra Q Nomani. Nomani,
journalist and Pakistani immigrant, is part of a group of Asian
immigrant parents in the DC suburbs fighting to keep Thomas Jefferson HS
for Science & Technology, one of the top merit-based STEM high
schools in the country, from being dismantled in
the name of "equity", because parents of Asian ancestry make
their children study too much (I wish I were kidding, but this is an
actual accusation being made to justify eliminating merit admissions -
something that is also happening in New York City, San Francisco and
other Progressive dominated cities).
Jodi Shaw, ("The
repeated insistence that our ability or willingness to engage in these
performative rituals as a continued condition of our employment is a
potent brand of harassment - the kind everyone colludes in because we
are too afraid not to")(5), graduate of Smith College,
who works as an administrative assistant there. After a two-year
ordeal of Woke brainwashing, in desperation Ms Shaw went public with a YouTube channel about
what was happening at Smith. UPDATE: Ms Shaw has just resigned from
Smith. Rather than accept a settlement from the college that would have
required her to stay silent, she is leaving without anything. You can
read excerpts from her resignation letter below (6). It is worth your time to do so.
TRANSGENDER
First, a word of explanation. Those
listed below have no objections to adults making informed decisions
regarding gender transitions (nor do I, having known at least one person
who has gone through this). Rather, it is about the inability to
discuss any aspect of gender without being accused of being transphobic
and having transgender activists seek to have someone banned or lose
their job. The people below generally believe that men and women are
different, that gender is not a choice, that mothers should not be
called "birthing persons" and other tortured convoluted language used to
avoid the truth, that one should at least be able to ask why men should
be allowed in the girls restrooms and women's prisons, and whether it
is good policy to allow minor children to undergo chemical transition.
Dr Debra Soh ("We can support equal rights without denying science or biology"),
Abigail Shrier
("fact checked" by USA Today and Instagram for making a factually
accurate statement regarding the Biden EO on Gender Identity. On December 8, 2021, Shrier gave a powerful talk at Princeton which you should read. An excerpt:
When polled, nearly two out of three Americans (62%) say they are
afraid to express an unpopular opinion. That doesn’t sound like a free
people in a free country. We are, each day, force-fed falsehoods we are
all expected to take seriously, on pain of forfeiting esteem and
professional opportunity:
“Some men have periods and get
pregnant.” “Hard work and objectivity are hallmarks of whiteness.” “Only
a child knows her own true gender.” “Transwomen don’t have an unfair
advantage when playing girls’ sports.”
I know why students keep their heads down. They are hoping for that Goldman or New York Times
internship, which they don’t want to put in jeopardy. Well, any
institution that takes our brightest, most capable young
people—Princeton graduates!—and tells you can only work here if you
think like we tell you to and keep your mouth shut, that isn’t really
Goldman Sachs and it isn’t the paper of record. It’s the husk of a
once-great institution, and it’s not worth grasping for. Talk to alums
at these institutions: they sound like those living under communist
regimes. That’s the America that awaits you if you will not speak up.(7)
If you want to know who really has privilege understand that Shrier's speech was forced off campus because of threats to her sponsors while, on the same night, Princeton Pride Alliance hosted an on-campus, university-catered event.
Maya Forstater (English woman who lost her job for a series of tweets questioning government plans to allow people to declare their own gender because she believes biological sex is real and immutable; lost her first appeal when court ruled that her views were "not worthy of respect in a democratic society", publicly supported by JK Rowling, who herself is being constantly attacked by transgender activists, Forstater just won her High Court appeal).
JK Rowling ("Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?" "I’ve now received so many death threats I could paper the house with them, and I haven’t stopped speaking out. Perhaps – and I’m just throwing this out there – the best way to prove your movement isn’t a threat to women, is to stop stalking, harassing and threatening us")
Kara Dansky ("Equality for both sides" will never work. This isn't a clash of "trans rights" v women's rights. It's about women fighting for our rights based on the material reality of sex.")
Will Malone (Malone, an endocrinologist writes, "Europe is turning away from hormones & surgeries for gender dysphoric minors. In the US, it is still politically positioned as a left vs right issue, but safeguarding youth should be a universal focus for all.")
Callie Burt (professor of criminology removed from the editorial board of Feminist Criminology for, in her own words, publishing "a peer-reviewed article in said journal that recognized the distinction between sex and gender and opposed the prioritization of in-the-moment gender self-ID over sex for access to all (formerly) sex-separated spaces, no exceptions.")
Miranda Newsom (focus on men competing in women's sports, "sports are sex based, not gender based for a reason. we are a sex class that differs from males")
This is from Chimamanda Adichie, the Nigerian writer and femininst, regarding the Woke she encounters:
People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our
humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the
prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce
your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the
chosen puritan class.
People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually
read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend
their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually
mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’
People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take
is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication
in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current
version of ideological orthodoxy.
People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished
pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for
anybody genuinely curious or confused.
The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but
the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now
angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.
For those interested in the theoretical nuts and bolts and bigger implications behind CRT, the New Discourses website provides very well done primers.
Essential online magazines to read are Tablet and Quillette, neither of which are conservative. Tablet is "a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture"
which provides a wide range of stories from different perspectives and
has increasingly featured more articles related to CRT. One of its featured writers, Liel Leibovitz recently announced he's joining the resistance to the growing authoritarianism of the Left:
And
then came The Turn. If you’ve lived through it yourself, you know that
The Turn doesn’t happen overnight, that it isn’t easily distilled into
one dramatic breakdown moment, that it happens hazily and over
time—first a twitch, then a few more, stretching into a gnawing
discomfort and then, eventually, a sense of panic.
You
may be among the increasing numbers of people going through The Turn
right now. Having lived through the turmoil of the last half
decade—through the years of MAGA and antifa and rampant identity
politics and, most dramatically, the global turmoil caused by
COVID-19—more and more of us feel absolutely and irreparably politically
homeless. Instinctively, we looked to the Democratic Party, the only
home we and our parents and their parents before them had ever known or
seriously considered. But what we saw there—and in the newspapers we
used to read, and in the schools whose admission letters once made us so
proud—was terrifying. However we tried to explain what was happening on
“the left,” it was hard to convince ourselves that it was right, or
that it was something we still truly believed in. That is what The Turn
is about.
You
might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling
like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or
individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are
afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you
have questions about public health policies—including the effects of
lockdowns and school closures
on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out
loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living
through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores
isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so
because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist. You are living
through The Turn if you seethed watching a terrorist organization attack
the world’s only Jewish state, but seethed silently because your
colleagues were all on Twitter and Facebook sharing celebrity memes
about ending Israeli apartheid while having little interest in American kids dying on the streets
because of failed policies. If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak
your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown
you if you shared your most intimately held concerns, if you are feeling
a bit breathless and a bit hopeless and entirely unsure what on earth
is going on, I am sorry to inform you that The Turn is upon you.
Quillette
describes itself as "a platform for free thought. We respect ideas,
even dangerous ones. We also believe that free expression and the free
exchange of ideas help human societies flourish and progress."
Founded to provide an outlet from those threatened institutionally
across the political spectrum it has increasingly focused on the threat
from the Left because that's where the threat is.
These liberals
and progressives realize they are at the same, and sometimes greater,
risk as conservatives in terms of losing jobs, careers, reputation if
they dissent from any of the commandments of CRT but have the courage to
speak out. We need more like them.
I also recommend reading Wilfred Reilly, a centrist and professor at an HBCU (historically black college/university), who states "I am not an anti-racist, in the sense of 'obsessively trying to dismantle every institution which produces different outcomes across groups.' I'm just not racist, which is an utterly cool place to be".
Reilly also has an interesting thread where he asked: "What was your red-pill (non-racist version) or plain old "enough with this woke crap" moment?
For a variety of reasons, I suspect almost everyone following me used to be conventionally liberal. Why'd that change?". The responses are worth reading. In Reilly's case he said it was when in May 2020 public health officials announced it was okay for people to go out and protest and riot because if it was for the "right cause", participants would magically be provided with a covid immunity shield.
More recently, Prof Reilly wrote a fascinating piece on "Testing the Tests for Racism":
Throughout much of the modern era, a large number of empirically-minded
social scientists have pointed out that racism seems by any objective
standard to be declining.
However, other scholars argue that anonymous tests show considerable
modern-era bias against blacks and other racial minorities. How can both of these results co-exist, across dozens of well-designed studies?
Anti-woke
liberals and progressives also have to come to grips with the fact
there is something is wrong with modern liberalism which has allowed
this ideology to flourish. CRT has been able to use the tenets of
liberalism to infiltrate and then metastasize within the institutions
liberals used to dominate. Liberalism has proven defenseless against an
ideology which rejects its foundational beliefs in tolerance and
rational inquiry. That very failing is the subject of an article by progressive law professor, Lama Abu Odeh (about whom I've written before), The Academic Origins of the American Revolution:
"No sooner had white liberals purged conservatives from academia (9% of
all university faculty is conservative; the number is vanishingly small
in the liberal arts) than they witnessed a rebellion to their left. A
younger generation of scholars arose that had learned well what the
progressive academics of a previous generation had taught them, namely,
that there is no such thing as objectivity or neutrality, and that all
knowledge claims are about power. While progressive academic boomers
developed these ideas in part as a weaponized critique of an earlier
generation of academic white men—whether liberal, conservative, or
leftist—who had lorded it over them, they now find themselves the object
of the rebellion of the generation they themselves mentored. The
chickens have come to roost in their own backyard."
"One could dismiss it all as a moral rebellion sweeping the world of
liberal or formerly liberal institutions except there are no other kind;
liberals have captured all institutions of public culture, a process
that has been unfolding for a while now and only intensified after
Trump’s election. For a while, it seemed to liberals that taking on the
progressive mantle themselves and unleashing the moral rebellion in
their ranks was a good weapon to wave in the face of Trump and his base,
until they found themselves purged by their own revolutionary guards.
It was all fun and games until the mob came for them."
There
are also conservatives providing an invaluable service in providing
concrete examples of the use of CRT materials in education and
training. Sources are parents whose children are being subjected to
this insane and hateful garbage and employees of companies and
government agencies being subjected to training sessions which employ
techniques used during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Christopher Rufo is on Twitter and you can also find him at christopherrufo.com
One
of the stunning revelations of the past year is the extent to which
these pernicious and destructive doctrines have already taken root in
our educational system. You can follow an ongoing lawsuit
filed by the black parent of a mixed-race child against a private
school, alleging her child is being forced to make compelled speech endorsing CRT concepts, contrary to his personal conscience and beliefs, and was retaliated against when he objected.
I
could go on and on with horrifying examples of what is happening in our
society but if you sample just a few of the names I've mentioned above
you will find plenty.
And finally I can't resist recommending Titania McGrath,
a British woke spoof account. When started in 2018 it seemed over the
top absurd but you can no longer distinguish the satire from what the
woke are doing in reality every day.
---------------------------------------------------------------
You can read earlier entries in the Your Future series for more about CRT so here is a summary:
CRT is a conspiracy theory, which unlike QAnon, has considerable support in American institutions and now in the Federal government. It claims that the only determinant
for actions in our society is race (sometimes gender is added), a
society which has been constructed by whites in a conspiracy to maintain
white supremacy and systemic racism. All of the language used in our
society has the sole purpose of maintaining that dominance. The
proof of that dominance is any result in our society that is not
"equitable" (that is, does not result in numerical equality of each
race) because race and white privilege is the only explanation for
inequitable results. To argue against this is to use the language of
white supremacy and thus adherents of CRT do not need to be engage with
its opponents, instead they can simply be denounced because to argue
against CRT is in itself proof of racism.
Think I'm exaggerating? Here's a chart from a corporate diversity training using CRT:
It is rejection of the sentiments that George Washington expressed in his 1790 letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island that, "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was
by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the
exercise of their inherent natural rights."
In
other words, tolerance is not something bestowed by one group to
another, the concept then followed everyone else in the world, but
rather was based on a sense of mutuality; what we owe to each other.
That view is explicitly rejected by CRT and by those in the division,
intolerance, and exclusion community.(8)If
you think the language of "equity", which has replaced "equality" in our
discourse, does not have real world implications think again. Last fall
the CDC's public health advisory panel on vaccinations established
priorities for the new covid vaccines based on equity principles even
though the CDC's own modeling showed that thousands more would die based
on those principles. The panel of public health experts effectively
endorsed voluntary manslaughter because they valued equity above human
lives.
Think about it -
"equity" means treating individuals and groups differently in order to
achieve "equal" outcomes. And since we know that an equal outcome in
the sense used in CRT is only momentary and will come out of balance
over time, discrimination will be required forever.
Many
people misunderstand how CRT uses the term "systemic racism" (a term
which is the organizing principle of the Biden administration). It has
nothing to do with legal, institutional, or conscious racism. In CRT
lingo any society in which any outcomes as measured by racial groups do
not reflect the proportion of that group, as it exists in that society,
is, by definition, evidence of "systemic racism".
Given
this viewpoint, CRT holds that power, and who has it, is the only
important organizing principle in society; not ideas, not competing
interests. CRT will use processes to gain control and power but does
not believe those processes need to be reciprocal or neutral. Once they
have achieved control and power, those processes can be discarded. As
President Erdogan of Turkey said to King Abdullah of Jordan, "democracy is like a bus, when it gets to my stop I get off". Or as Frank Herbert put it in Children of Dune:
"When
I am Weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom because that is according
to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your
Freedom because that is according to my principles."
And
that is why the progressives and liberals listed above are trying to
ring the alarm about the New Racism which has infiltrated and is
destroying traditional liberalism.
Because everything in how
society is organized is solely determined by the white conspiracy to
perpetuate white supremacy, everything in society needs to be reordered
and there is no distinction between the political and the personal.
That is why it is necessary to purge anyone who says or thinks anything
defined by CRT as racist from jobs, careers, educational opportunities,
regardless of whether their actions demonstrate any racism.
It
is why our very language is changing because it is by the use of
language designed by whites that white supremacy is maintained. Once
language changes the structure of society can be changed. This explains
why teaching and training curriculum based on CRT spouts nonsense like 2+2 does not necessarily equal 4 or
that having a meeting agenda and being punctual is a white supremacist way of thinking.
CRT
repudiates the notions of the Civil Rights Movement that we share a
common humanity and creed. It is why the 1619 Project, historical
nonsense based on CRT, almost eliminates Frederick Douglass and
minimizes the role of Dr Martin Luther King when it comes to race in
America because their ideas were not based solely on race. It
repudiates the ideal of neutral processes when it comes to judging
people as individuals. It is why the 1619 Project seeks to erase the
real American founding because that founding is based on universal
ideas.
Don't believe it? Here are two Critical Race theorists, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic, writing in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction:
Unlike
traditional civil-rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and
step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very
foundation of the liberal order; including equality theory, legal
reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of
constitutional law.
Here's a little more wisdom from the same duo:
For
the critical race theorist, objective truth, like merit, does not
exist, at least in social science and politics. In these realms, truth
is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant
group.
What are the consequences? Geoff Shullenberger spells it out:
Simple predictor of which victims you care about and which you don't; if you can hold your enemy responsible their victimization, you care; if you can't, you don't.(9)
For
my liberal friends who have difficulty understanding how radical the
woke at places like the Times are, think about those great narrative
historians of America you enjoy reading - Ron Chernow, Doris Kearns
Goodwin, Joseph Ellis, David McCullough. From a CRT perspective these authors promote white supremacy
and privilege and are as deserving of the bonfires as anything written
by William F Buckley.
CRT
denies that the individual can think outside this structure imposed
by white racists. It denies the power of ideas, other than those
focused solely on race. It is why CRT and white nationalism resemble
each other. Both believe that race is the sole determinant upon which
American society should be based. Their difference is in who should be
on the top. And, in some instances, CRT and white nationalism focus on
the same "enemies". During 2020, the NY Times, the major proponent of
CRT in the media, published an article listing the most powerful people
(as defined by the paper) in America. The purpose was to demonstrate
that blacks are underrepresented and thus provide another example of
systemic racism. Interestingly, elements of both the Woke Left and
white nationalism quickly identified that there was a subgroup within
the white power elite identified by the Times - a subgroup with the most
disproportionate number of powerful people compared to their percentage
of American population - Jews. Under CRT any group which has a larger
than equitable share of power has gained that power via a conspiracy
designed to obtain and then control its position of supremacy -
therefore Jews, who are also white whether they consider themselves or
not to be so, have conspired to attain and then maintain that position, a
viewpoint CRT proponents share with white nationalists. For more on the
dangers facing Jews from the New Racism read Pamela Paresky's piece in the Spring 2021 edition of Sapir:
In
the critical social justice paradigm, Jews, who have never been seen as
white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as
white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil.
We Jews have always pointed to our success in America as proof of its openness and opportunity. Under CRT that is turned against Jews because it is precisely our success that "proves" we are part of the white supremacy conspiracy.
For more on how Jews fare under CRT read another Paresky piece, "Critical Race Theory and the 'Hyper White' Jew". Though, as this article from the Hedgehog Review tells us, the New Racists' problem with religion is not limited to Jews. This is scary stuff. For an update on how it's going read "Publishers against the People of the Book".
The ascension of CRT has occurred with dizzying speed. After a long academic gestation period it burst onto the scene like the creature bursting from John Hurt's chest in Alien and with the same ruthless destructiveness. As twitter person The End Times puts it, "Ibram Kendi's [author of How To Be An Antiracist] racism went from fringe to published book to mandatory policy in a handful of years".
Now Kendi has an endowed chair at Boston University, along with $10
million in funding from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, from which he can spout
his anti-democratic and totalitarian views such as:
The
only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only
remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
To best sum it up, a young English woman
who joined the woke movement motivated by a feeling of solidarity with
marginalised groups, left after realizing it was not really about:
Solidarity: it creates division amongst people based on certain identities, even between different minorities
Equality: it creates hierarchies based on certain identities
Improvements: it wants to dismantle
Inclusivity: it excludes people from the wrong identities
Compassion: it's about hatred, revenge and anger
Diversity: it wants everyone to think and behave the same way
Lessening discrimination and stigma: It creates more
Liberation: It thrives on authority and control
---------------------------------------------------------------
(1) The Woke Temple visually summarizes my take:
(1a) For a recent example of the insane and unforgiving nature of the CRT crowd read this story from Reason Magazine about a 34 year old choral composer of religious music and a liberal who lost his livelihood and career because of a tweet in the midst of the Floyd riots, objecting to the arson and destruction happening in his city. Also read, "Should You Be Allowed To Disagree With Your Progressive Colleagues?" - the answer for most professionals is no.
(2) Many immigrants from China, Cuba, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have raised warnings recently about what they see happening in America and how it reminds them of the authoritarian regimes they left. A couple of years ago a theater professor at Columbia, who escaped from Romania in the early 1980s, left the US to return to his home country because he felt he now had more freedom in his homeland, while the US was becoming more and more like the regime he'd fled decades ago.
(3)
Pro Tip about twitter. It's easy to set up a Twitter account. I have
one
and have never Tweeted and never plan to. I use it to read people and
organizations I'm interested in. In turn, those people and groups
provide useful links to more lengthier pieces as well as original
documents. If you hit the Follow button on a
Twitter account, your own account will show to anyone who looks what you
are Following. To avoid that, bookmark Twitter accounts you want to
read regularly as Favorites on your phone and just use those when
wanting
to access an account.
(4) I've noticed a coordinated effort in the media beginning in early June to both downplay the significance of CRT and to claim all the opposition to it is coming from the right wing, which is a demonstrable lie. It indicates to me the media is worried about the growing opposition to CRT among decent people across the political spectrum and of all races and ethnicities.
(5)
The climate of fear is not limited to America. Here is a prominent
English academic and feminist deplatformed because of her views on
transgender issues speaking on the fear.
Feminists who think there are biological differences between the sexes
are under fierce assault, accused of transphobia by activists. Here's a young woman fired
from her job for refusing to kowtow to those denying biology. JK
Rowling, a firm feminist and progressive, has been under attack for the
same reason, but been able to resist deplatforming because she is such a
valuable property for her publisher and representatives.
Unfortunately, some other women who have supported her, have been
deplatformed because they are not as valuable to their publishers and
literary agents.
(6) Excerpts from Jodi Smith resignation letter:
Dear President McCartney:
I am writing to notify
you that effective today, I am resigning from my position as Student
Support Coordinator in the Department of Residence Life at Smith
College. This has not been an easy decision, as I now face a deeply
uncertain future. As a divorced mother of two, the economic uncertainty
brought about by this resignation will impact my children as well. But I
have no choice. The racially hostile environment that the college has
subjected me to for the past two and a half years has left me physically
and mentally debilitated. I can no longer work in this environment, nor
can I remain silent about a matter so central to basic human dignity
and freedom.
I graduated from Smith College in 1993. Those four
years were among the best in my life. Naturally, I was over the moon
when, years later, I had the opportunity to join Smith as a staff
member. I loved my job and I loved being back at Smith.
But the
climate — and my place at the college — changed dramatically when, in
July 2018, the culture war arrived at our campus when a student accused a
white staff member of calling campus security on her because of racial
bias. The student, who is black, shared her account of this incident
widely on social media, drawing a lot of attention to the college.
Before
even investigating the facts of the incident, the college immediately
issued a public apology to the student, placed the employee on leave,
and announced its intention to create new initiatives, committees,
workshops, trainings, and policies aimed at combating “systemic racism”
on campus.
In spite of an independent investigation into the
incident that found no evidence of racial bias, the college ramped up
its initiatives aimed at dismantling the supposed racism that pervades
the campus. This only served to support the now prevailing narrative
that the incident had been racially motivated and that Smith staff are
racist.
. . .
As it
turned out, my experience in the library was just the beginning. In my
new position, I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my
personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of
my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to
participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of
my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member
violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women!
Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my
supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our
department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s
population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and
“subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like
race.
Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict
through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes
on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am
asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students
that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto
themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing,
prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young
people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.
Although
I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply
troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it.
This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades
Smith College.
The last straw came in January 2020, when I
attended a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat focused on racial
issues. The hired facilitators asked each member of the department to
respond to various personal questions about race and racial identity.
When it was my turn to respond, I said “I don’t feel comfortable talking
about that.” I was the only person in the room to abstain.
Later,
the facilitators told everyone present that a white person’s discomfort
at discussing their race is a symptom of “white fragility.” They said
that the white person may seem like they are in distress, but that it is
actually a “power play.” In other words, because I am white, my genuine
discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and
humiliated in front of all of my colleagues.
I filed an internal
complaint about the hostile environment, but throughout that process,
over the course of almost six months, I felt like my complaint was taken
less seriously because of my race. I was told that the civil rights law
protections were not created to help people like me. And after I filed
my complaint, I started to experience retaliatory behavior, like having
important aspects of my job taken away without explanation.
Under
the guise of racial progress, Smith College has created a racially
hostile environment in which individual acts of discrimination and
hostility flourish. In this environment, people’s worth as human beings,
and the degree to which they deserve to be treated with dignity and
respect, is determined by the color of their skin. It is an environment
in which dissenting from the new critical race orthodoxy — or even
failing to swear fealty to it like some kind of McCarthy-era loyalty
oath — is grounds for public humiliation and professional retaliation.
I
can no longer continue to work in an environment where I am constantly
subjected to additional scrutiny because of my skin color. I can no
longer work in an environment where I am told, publicly, that my
personal feelings of discomfort under such scrutiny are not legitimate
but instead are a manifestation of white supremacy. Perhaps most
importantly, I can no longer work in an environment where I am expected
to apply similar race-based stereotypes and assumptions to others, and
where I am told — when I complain about having to engage in what I
believe to be discriminatory practices — that there are “legitimate
reasons for asking employees to consider race” in order to achieve the
college’s “social justice objectives.”
What passes for
“progressive” today at Smith and at so many other institutions is
regressive. It taps into humanity’s worst instincts to break down into
warring factions, and I fear this is rapidly leading us to a very
twisted place. It terrifies me that others don’t seem to see that racial
segregation and demonization are wrong and dangerous no matter what its
victims look like. Being told that any disagreement or feelings of
discomfort somehow upholds “white supremacy” is not just morally wrong.
It is psychologically abusive.
Equally troubling are the many
others who understand and know full well how damaging this is, but do
not speak out due to fear of professional retaliation, social censure,
and loss of their livelihood and reputation. I fear that by the time
people see it, or those who see it manage to screw up the moral courage
to speak out, it will be too late.
I wanted to change things at
Smith. I hoped that by bringing an internal complaint, I could somehow
get the administration to see that their capitulation to critical race
orthodoxy was causing real, measurable harm. When that failed, I hoped
that drawing public attention to these problems at Smith would finally
awaken the administration to this reality. I have come to conclude,
however, that the college is so deeply committed to this toxic ideology
that the only way for me to escape the racially hostile climate is to
resign. It is completely unacceptable that we are now living in a
culture in which one must choose between remaining in a racially
hostile, psychologically abusive environment or giving up their income.
. . .
This was an extremely difficult decision
for me and comes at a deep personal cost. I make $45,000 a year; less
than a year’s tuition for a Smith student. I was offered a settlement in
exchange for my silence, but I turned it down. My need to tell the
truth — and to be the kind of woman Smith taught me to be — makes it
impossible for me to accept financial security at the expense of
remaining silent about something I know is wrong. My children’s future,
and indeed, our collective future as a free nation, depends on people
having the courage to stand up to this dangerous and divisive ideology,
no matter the cost.
Sincerely,
Jodi Shaw
(7) Vaclav Havel's 1978 essay The Power Of The Powerless described the system of repression in Soviet dominated Eastern Europe he called the Post-Totalitarian System. This should be essential reading for every concerned American. I never thought it would come to this in our country, but here we are. We are all now potentially Havel's greengrocer, who displays regime supporting signs in his window that he does not believe in, just so he can survive (see pages 5-7 of the essay).
"The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it
does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system
is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by
bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is en-
slaved in the name of the work ing class; the complete degradation
of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving
people of in formation is called making it available; the use of power
to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbi-
trary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repres-
sion of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial
influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of
free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elec-
tions become the highest form of democracy; banning independent
thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occu-
pation becomes fraternal assistance.
Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system."
(8) The Woke critique of Washington's sentiment was that he was a hypocrite since not all in America were tolerated and many were excluded from that sense of mutuality. That is correct. American history has been a story of expanding that sense of tolerance and mutuality based upon the aspirational statements of the Founding generation, however imperfectly followed at the time. CRT is a direct repudiation of that aspiration. It is reactionary, a step back to pre-modern times. If the Woke succeed we will be living in a country were tolerance is extended only to those who agree with the Woke.
Washington's take on tolerance contrasts with that of the Puritans who took up arms against the King one hundred and fifty years before believing that toleration was "the whore of Babylon's back door". The Puritans who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 held the same views, which tells us much about how a specifically American perspective evolved by the time of the Revolutionary War.
It is also true that Washington's tolerance is dependent upon some core set of values held by, if not all, a preponderance of citizens. It cannot stand in an "anything goes" culture.
(9) Exhibit A: If Trump had been reelected, triggering mass protests, a mob attacked the Capitol on January 6, and a white policeman shot and killed an unarmed black woman protestor what do you think the reaction would have been from our institutions? As it was, when an unarmed white woman protester was shot and killed by a black policeman, the only problem the New York Times saw was that Ashli Babbitt's body wasn't left out as carrion for the crows as an object lesson to others. For my real time take on January 6 read this. And for my take on President-elect Biden's response, and how it fits into the theme of this post, read this piece I wrote on January 8.
