The Ten Commandments of Critical Race Theory

August 29, 2021By Geoffrey Clarfield

 

Recently, one of Canada’s best-known rabbis (an American by birth and a graduate of prestigious colleges in the USA) asked me bluntly and simply to explain the essence of Critical Race Theory. This is what I told him.

Critical Race Theory is the latest version of Marxism, except it has gone racial. This means that unlike traditional Marxist theory, which used to focus on the injustices experienced by working men and women in industrial and industrializing societies around the world and preached violent revolution to overthrow the capitalist democracy that persecutes them, the new victims are any kind of minority, usually people of color, but not exclusively. The “white” working class no longer counts.

In the USA, Cultural Marxists have elected African Americans to fulfill the role of those persecuted by capitalism, which is done by white people or people with white skin (despite the fact that more than 50% of self defined African Americans belong to the silent, non protesting, law abiding middle classes or “bourgeoise”)............Let me therefore outline the ten basic commandments of Cultural Marxism which not surprisingly  are violations of almost every one of the ten commandments of the Bible, values that permeate the Constitution of the United States and have informed much of British common law. Here they are:

1. God is dead -- therefore the means justify the ends. If the Cultural Marxists believe that bourgeois culture and society should be destroyed then, there is no moral restraint-look at Antifa riots to support this point
2. One now worships Karl Marx. He is the substitute for God. And his prophets are violent and numerous.
3. Language is flexible. You can take any name in vain. Words mean what you want them to mean if it furthers your agenda like “largely peaceful protests”
4. The Sabbath means nothing. There is no rest for the righteous. They must be attacked during the 24/7 news round and on occasion arrested at gunpoint by the FBI or CIA. And so, defund the police and turn every city into a war zone.
5. Mothers and fathers are not honoured. Your children can be taken from you and their gender forcefully reassigned as God did not make man and woman according to sacred archetypes.
6. Murder is ok if you are a political enemy. Remember Ashlii Babbitt?
7. Adultery is meaningless because marriage and the nuclear family is oppressive.
8. Lying is what you do to defeat your enemies
9. The property of your enemies (Jews, Christians, Vietnamese minorities, Korean grocers, “whites” of any kind) is up for grabs. Take it!
10. Envy is everywhere and greed rules

This short enumeration of the ten commandments of the Cultural Marxists should provide a good grid from which to understand their values and goals. It permeates their writings and their practise. The rest is gobbledygook....................To Read More......

Campus race-obsession: Proselytizing the alumni

June 12, 2021 By Henry Wickham

I am sitting here thumbing through my newly arrived Kenyon Alumni Magazine.  Other than the obits and the class notes, it is rarely worth reading and is usually nauseatingly predictable as a vehicle for all the conventional campus orthodoxies.  As ever, this one is full of all the woke BS that I expect to read from a hermetically sealed echo chamber that virtually every campus has become.

As does every college alumni magazine, the college publishes these little vignettes on those wonderful alumni who do all those enlightened, smart, successful things.

I see we have "Jane" (name disguised), who is doing good things in Arlington, Virginia.  She is working hard to end "systemic racism," though it is never defined and merely asserted as "must be true."  In 2017, she founded Facing Race in Arlington/White Folks Facing Race, which is designed to "connect community members who are working on becoming more anti-racist."  Are there different levels of anti-racism?  Just asking.  What could be finer than her continuing personal mission of "unlearning white supremacy"?

We are told that the "survival" of her "colleagues of color" depends on her work.  Can those sheeted nightriders who frequent Arlington, Virginia be but a few blocks away?  So brave, so inspired — proud to be one of the 300 at Thermopylae on the Potomac.........To Read More......

 

 

Minnesota Theater Cancels Cinderella Production Because Cast Was ‘Too White’

By Catherine Smith  March 26, 2021

 

A suburban Minneapolis theater company has cancelled a production of “Cinderella” because its cast was “too white.” Chanhassen Dinner Theatres was scheduled to stage Roger & Hammerstein’s classic play later this year before its artistic director stepped in to criticise its lack of racial diversity, twincities.com reported.  “It was 98 percent white,” Michael Brindisi, the theater’s artistic director, told the Twin Cities Pioneer Press on Wednesday after looking at the actors who had been cast. “That doesn’t work with what we’re saying we’re going to do.”

Brindisi said he considered recasting but instead decided to “scrap this and start fresh with a clean slate.”  Chanhassen Dinner Theatres has hired a diversity consultant and pledged a commitment to “identity-conscious casting and becoming a more intentionally anti-racist theater,” it said in a statement.  “After careful consideration and with our ongoing commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, we have made the decision to cancel our upcoming production,” it states.

“In addition to changing future programming, we are establishing new pre-production protocols. We will be inviting and paying [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] artists to analyze the production with our creative teams through a new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion lens.”........To Read More...

 

When Minorities Vote GOP, the Media Smears Republicans as Racists

Daniel Greenfield March 24, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 In just one week, the Washington Post churned out two op-eds on the same theme, "The GOP is Now Just the Party of White Grievance" and "The Republican Party is Making Jim Crow Segregationists Proud". The D.C. Democrat paper doesn’t bother clarifying why Democrats from two generations ago would be thrilled that 1 in 5 black men voted for President Trump.

Ever since the election, the media has been beating its narrative drum with one message.

CNN howls that Republicans are the worst racists. The New York Times insists they’re even more racist than that. And MSNBC will counter that only white racists would vote Republican.

The most famous media exponent of the “white grievance” line is Stuart Stevens: Romney’s senior strategist, who went on to join the Lincoln Project. Stevens claimed on MSNBC that the GOP, "went down a path to embrace white grievance as its core" and that, "of the Americans who are 15 years and under, the majority are nonwhite. They're gonna be nonwhite when they turn 18 and start voting and that's the end of the Republican party as we know it."

But David Shor, Obama's battleground state election analyst, pointed out, "I don’t think a lot of people expected Donald Trump’s GOP to have a much more diverse support base than Mitt Romney’s did in 2012. But that’s what happened.

“My party obviously has an embarrassingly small share of African American votes,” Senator Romney claimed after embarrassingly participating in a Black Lives Matter rally.

President Trump had done better than Romney with both black and Latino voters the first time around. And he improved on those numbers the second time around. As Shor notes, among Democrats, "Hispanic support dropped by 8 to 9 percent" and "there’s evidence that there was something like a 5 percent decline in Asian American support for Democrats."

1 in 3 Latino men and 1 in 5 black men voted for President Trump in 2020.

Meanwhile over half of the House minority freshmen are Republicans. This is the first time that more House minority freshmen have been Republicans than Democrats.

The Jim Crow segregationists must be really proud of that one.

As Henry Olsen, the author of The Working Class Republican noted, "Every seat Republicans have flipped from blue to red has been captured by a woman or a minority."

These are strange numbers for the party of “white grievance”.

The Democrats and their media keep shouting that Republicans are becoming whiter even as Republican voters and elected officials are more diverse than they have been in a generation.

As Shor noted, Democrats gained "roughly 7 percent among white college graduates" and lost support among black, Hispanic, and Asian voters by 2, 9, and 5 percent respectively.

If any party out there is getting whiter, it’s the Democrats. And that has them worried.

These are some of the numbers that explain why Democrats are doubling down on accusations of Republican racism. These smears don’t reflect the real world, they’re a messaging operation by a radical party that bet its future on minority voters only to discover it’s losing its grip on them.

Democrat efforts to connect with minority voters backfired. As Shor noted, police defunding led to “conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations” to begin “voting more like conservative whites”. And trying to win over Hispanic voters with open borders was an even bigger disaster. “Asking voters whether they lean toward Biden and Trump, and then emphasizing the Democratic position on immigration, often caused Biden’s share of support among Latino respondents to decline.” So much for immigration pandering.

Black leaders and voters rejected police defunding. By the time the election was drawing near, Biden and the Democrats were forced to denounce race riots and reject police defunding.

Police defunding and open borders are only popular with AOC’s base of white hipsters.

Unable to meaningfully connect with minority voters, Democrats have defaulted back to accusing Republicans of racism. And insisting, all evidence to the contrary, that they’re a white party. It’s not only a lie, but it shows the level of desperation and contempt by the Democrats.

The Democrats have defined white grievance as opposition to critical race theory and their culture war. But neither are especially popular with minority voters. Going to war against Dr. Seuss may thrill the hearts of AOC’s white hipster base, but black and Hispanic parents want the Democrats to stand up to the teachers’ unions and reopen schools. San Francisco’s obsession with renaming closed schools even led to a rebuke from its black female mayor.

The Democrat culture war is based around generating racially polarizing moments, but they have nothing to do with the real concerns of most minority voters. They’re the noise of a college-educated lefty elite, white, black, and otherwise, talking about its ideological obsessions.

Eliminating Dr. Seuss doesn’t frame Republicans as the party of white grievance or racism. Instead it shows that the Democrats are unserious radicals who don’t intend to do anything for minority voters, and can’t even prioritize delivering the financial benefits that they promised.

But, much like Robin DiAngelo’s racist tract, White Fragility, when the Washington Post serially accuses Republicans of being white racists, it isn’t talking to minorities. The Post has fairly few minority readers, despite claiming to cover a city that is majority black. But that’s not the city that the paper is built to cover. The Post is a government paper and its demographic are officials, elected and unelected, and the swamp of contractors, consultants, and lobbyists around them.

White people are telling other white people that Republicans are the party of white people.

The strategy is less about winning over minority voters than making white college-educated voters feel like racists if they even think about voting Republican.

Critical race theory and cancel culture are the barbed wire on the plantation for white voters.

Democrats kept black voters in by telling them that Republicans are racists. Now just as minority voters are beginning to drift over the invisible fence, the Democrats are telling college-educated white voters that Republicans are racist. Racism is the plantation’s fence. Minority voters on the plantation had been taught to fear racism outside the invisible fence while college-educated white voters are being taught to fear the hidden racism lurking deep in their own whiteness.

But the fear strategy, fear of the outside world and fear of your own dark side, has its limits.

The Democrats have gone from the party of, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself” to the party of, “Fear thy neighbor” and worse still, “Fear thyself.” The party’s pitch has been distilled into fear and hatred. As more minorities vote Republican, the Democrats can only respond by ramping up the racism smears that have become their only real argument for the minority vote.

The more minorities vote Republican, the more the Democrat racism smears fly in the media.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.  

Thank you for reading.

A North Carolina school district says White parents are a problem

March 19, 2021  By Andrea Widbur

The plague of Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) has reached North Carolina’s largest school district. Christopher Rufo obtained documents from a teachers’ training program held last year that was a festival of race hatred. CRT blatantly violates the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and offends the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. What’s especially disturbing about the training in Wake County is that the teachers were told to ignore parents’ concerns and force the training on their children.

Just to orient those who may be new to CRT, it holds that every aspect of American life is infused with racism, all of it emanating from Whites towards other races. (Jews are classed as White and come in for both race hatred and anti-Semitism from the CRT crowd.) Whites who object to being labeled as evil, racist oppressors are told that their objections only prove their racism. Additionally, anything associated with Western culture – scientific accuracy, grammar, punctuality, ambition, organization, whatever – is inherently racist..........To Read More....

• Are we headed towards cultural doom?
• White imbecility 

Subversive Education

North Carolina’s largest school district launches a campaign against “whiteness in educational spaces.”

Christopher F. Rufo March 17, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

Last year, the Wake County Public School System, which serves the greater Raleigh, North Carolina area, held an equity-themed teachers’ conference with sessions on “whiteness,” “microaggressions,” “racial mapping,” and “disrupting texts,” encouraging educators to form “equity teams” in schools and push the new party line: “antiracism.”

The February 2020 conference, attended by more than 200 North Carolina public school teachers, began with a “land acknowledgement,” a ritual recognition suggesting that white North Carolinians are colonizers on stolen Native American land. Next, the superintendent of Wake County Public Schools, Cathy Moore, introduced the day’s program and shuffled teachers to breakout sessions across eight rooms. Freelance reporter A.P. Dillon obtained the documents from the sessions through a public records request and provided them to City Journal.

At the first session, “Whiteness in Ed Spaces,” school administrators provided two handouts on the “norms of whiteness.” These documents claimed that “(white) cultural values” include “denial,” “fear,” “blame,” “control,” “punishment,” “scarcity,” and “one-dimensional thinking.” According to notes from the session, the teachers argued that “whiteness perpetuates the system” of injustice and that the district’s “whitewashed curriculum” was “doing real harm to our students and educators.” The group encouraged white teachers to “challenge the dominant ideology” of whiteness and “disrupt” white culture in the classroom through a series of “transformational interventions.”

Parents, according to the teachers, should be considered an impediment to social justice. When one teacher asked, “How do you deal with parent pushback?” the answer was clear: ignore parental concerns and push the ideology of antiracism directly to students. “You can’t let parents deter you from the work,” the teachers said. “White parents’ children are benefiting from the system” of whiteness and are “not learning at home about diversity (LGBTQ, race, etc.).” Therefore, teachers have an obligation to subvert parental wishes and beliefs. Any “pushback,” the teachers explained, is merely because white parents fear “that they are going to lose something” and find it “hard to let go of power [and] privilege.”

This isn’t an aberration. In fact, the district’s official Equity in Action plan encourages teachers to override parents in the pursuit of antiracism. “Equity leaders [should] have the confidence to take risks and make difficult decisions that are rooted in their values,” the document reads. “Even in the face of opposition, equity leaders can draw on a heartfelt conviction for what is best for students and families.” In other words, the school should displace the family as the ultimate arbiter of political morality.

The equity plan outlines this new ideology in chart format, announcing the district’s commitment to a series of fashionable pedagogies, including “color consciousness,” “white identity development,” “critical race theory,” “intersections of power and privilege,” and “anti-racist identity and action.”

The equity program in the Wake County Public School System is a massive enterprise. Founded in 2013, the district’s Office of Equity Affairs has now amassed a $1 million annual budget and hosts an ongoing sequence of school trainings, curriculum-development sessions, and teacher events. In 2019, for example, the office hosted a series of “courageous conversations” about race and a five-night discussion program about the podcast Seeing White, which asks listeners to consider how “whiteness” contributes to “police shootings of unarmed African Americans,” “acts of domestic terrorism,” and “unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring.”

According to Wake County Public Schools, the purpose of these programs is to achieve “equity,” which it defines as “eliminating the predictability of success and failure that correlates with any social or cultural factor.” This is naïve, at best. Cultural traits such as family environment, transmitted values, and study habits have an enormous influence on academic outcomes. The radical-left educators believe that this is an injustice. They see their job as leveling cultural differences, grouping students into the categories of inborn identity, and equalizing outcomes.

The administrators have the logic backwards. Rather than seek to level cultural factors, they should seek to uncover and then cultivate the cultural traits that lead to academic success across all racial groups. Despite all the recent focus on racial issues in education, the greater disparity in student outcomes today is, in fact, related to social class. As Stanford’s Sean Reardon has shown, the class gap in academic achievement is now twice as large as the race gap—precisely the opposite of what it was 50 years ago.

This news should suggest an opportunity to school administrators. They could pursue pedagogical strategies that help struggling students of all racial backgrounds. Sadly, rather than seizing this opportunity, teachers in Wake County are busy planning conference presentations on “toxic masculinity,” “microaggressions,” “trauma-informed yoga,” “peace circles,” and “applied critical race theory.” North Carolina might be a red state, but in its largest county, the school system has fully bought in to the latest progressive dogmas.

Parents across the U.S. should not assume that their local district is immune to these trends. The new political education is spreading everywhere.

Christopher F. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. Sign up for his weekly newsletter and watch his new documentary, America Lost, which tells the story of three “forgotten American cities.” This article is part of an ongoing series on critical race theory in American schools.

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). SUPPORT

 

The Left’s New Constitution

A raft of new legislation seeks to enshrine racial preferences into American society.

 

Mike Gonzalez March 15, 2021 @ City Journal, published with permission.  I recommend subscribing, it's free.

The recently enacted Covid-19 relief law and other bills wending their way through Congress openly favor members of certain races or ethnic categories. It’s hard to see how any of this legislation—all part of the Biden-Harris administration’s new focus on racial “equity” at the expense of equality—passes constitutional muster.

That doesn’t mean that the courts will strike them down. We have today a new, unwritten constitution—a hodgepodge of executive orders, court decisions, legislation, and conventions. Of course, we already have a written Constitution, drafted in 1787 and amended since. The cognitive dissonance of living under these two constitutional regimes is thus causing friction across society.

Consider the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act, a $5 billion monstrosity that Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock snuck into the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. The bill aims to provide payments to “Black farmers, Indigenous farmers, and farmers of color.” It includes $1 billion to address “systemic racism” at the Department of Agriculture.

The bill never says explicitly that blacks, Native Americans, or farmers who are immigrants from Latin America or their descendants should receive benefits; instead, it uses the term “socially disadvantaged famers.” For example, it instructs the secretary of agriculture to “forgive the obligation of each socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher who is a borrower of a farm loan made by the Secretary to repay the principal and interest outstanding as of the date of enactment of this Act on the farm loan.”

Warnock’s bill explains that “the term ‘socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher’ has the meaning given the term in 19 section 2501(a) of the Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990.” As that law explains, “The term ‘socially disadvantaged group’ means a group whose members have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities.” Department of Agriculture regulations also “define socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers as belonging to the following groups: American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians, Blacks or African Americans, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, and women.”

In other words, membership in any of these racial, ethnic, or gender categories automatically entitles a farmer to benefits, “without regard to individual qualities.” As University of Maryland professor George La Noue has written, “social disadvantage is, as a practical matter, established at birth, and cannot be challenged by evidence of a successful life.” These are the makings of a rigid caste system in America.

And Warnock’s bill is not the only farm bill explicitly channeling money to black Americans. There is also New Jersey senator Cory Booker’s Justice for Black Farmers Act. It creates a USDA agency that would buy land and grant it to eligible Black farmers. It also establishes a “Socially Disadvantaged Farmer and Rancher Bank.”

These and other bills in the works create entitlements based on race or ethnicity, not need. If the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, were to turn part of her California estate into farmland, she, too, would get federal money, as could former President Barack Obama, NBA legend Michael Jordan, and Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. It is that absurd.

It doesn’t stop with agriculture. Consider the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which calls for the end of racial profiling but will end up enshrining it. It does this by stating that “proof that the routine or spontaneous investigatory activities of law enforcement agents in a jurisdiction have had a disparate impact on individuals with a particular characteristic described in section 302(6) shall constitute prima facie evidence of a violation.” Those characteristics include “race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation.” As former Department of Education official Hans Bader puts it, “The practical effect would be to encourage police departments to stop innocent women, Asians, and whites, just to meet quotas based on gender and race. If police departments don’t meet these quotas, they could be sued by the Justice Department or individuals they stop.”

The Biden administration is also considering setting up a commission to study reparations, perhaps the quintessential race-based policy. Reparations establish collective guilt and collective innocence and mete out collective punishment and collective rewards, nearly 160 years after the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.

These are but the tip of the iceberg. Consider also the Recognizing People of African Descent and Black Europeans Act; the concurrent resolution urging the establishment of a United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation; and the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act of 2021 (introduced by Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and drawing on Ibram X. Kendi’s ideas).

All of this is likely unconstitutional, violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, as well Titles VI and VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The courts have already stated, for example, that it is unconstitutional to encourage racial quotas, which would put the Justice in Policing Act in jeopardy.

The woke Left understands that, as written and amended, the Constitution stands in the way of many of the things that it wants to do. This is why the Left has set about to cast the Constitution as illegitimate by, for example, purposely mischaracterizing the three-fifths compromise, pretending that the document perpetuated slavery, or calling it, as Kendi does, a “color-blind Constitution for a White-supremacist America.”

Will the courts strike down these laws? Or will they use them to build on the illegitimate new “constitution” of racial preferences? We will see.

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at The Heritage Foundation. He is the author of The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free.

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). SUPPORT

 

From an Outraged Citizen to Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina

By Rich Kozlovich

One of my favorite writers is Andrea Widburg, who on February 4, 2021 posted this piece: North Carolina's lt. governor shows how to fight back against a corrupt media, with what has to be the video for all time, along with these thoughts. 

Mark Robinson, currently North Carolina's Lieutenant Governor shows how to fight back against a corrupt media Mark Robinson stood up before the city council in Greensboro, North Carolina and gave an impassioned defense of the Second Amendment.

Since he's clearly not playing by the rules laid down by leftists and Republican invertebrates regarding how our children are being indoctrinated with leftist race dogma,  a local media outlet accused him, and the entire state Republican party, as being KKK entities.  He didn't like that at all, and when a local paper published this cartoon:

They were calling the entire North Carolina Republican party a KKK entity, including Robinson.  Well, he didn't like it and went after them with a level of vigor that needs to be tranfused into the entire Republican party.  He "ferociously attacked the newspaper for its dishonesty and ignorance"  He makes it clear, "I'm not going to go along to get along.  I'm going to call them out every time. "That's what every Republican should say when the media goes low"

To quote the author, "this man is no shrinking violet." To see his video taped response to this cartoon and these charged, to the original article as I can't duplicate it here.  

Unlike the MSM I feel it's important to tell the whole story, so, in all fairness, I feel I should note her comments about his anti-Semitic views, but as Andrea notes: 

When it comes to Robinson, as with Majorie Taylor Green's ill informed statements about Jews, it's important to recognize that neither she nor Robinson backs his statements with active malevolence.  Unlike the anti-Semitic Democrats in Congress, neither has shown hostility to the Jewish state (so far as I know), and both support American values.

As Sally Zelikovsky said, the answer is to educate, not destroy, those Republicans who need a new understanding of Jews and Judaism.  The fact is that we have almost no fighters in the Republican Party.  We shouldn't jettison the ones we have because they're flawed.  We should, instead, work with them to make them better.

An even more extensive piece appeared in the Washington Free Beacon quoting Robinson saying:

"The system of government that we have in this nation is not systemically racist; in fact, it is not racist at all," he said. "To say that this is a racist nation—that is not true. And when we write standards that point to that direction in any way, we are doing our students a disservice."

He's not opposed to education discussing the complex racial issues in America but to second graders?  He wisely notes: 

"I don't think that these things that we have included have been for the benefit of the students,"...... "There's no reason why we should be trying to teach second graders about the complex issues of race. Those children have enough on their plate learning how to read, and write, and do mathematics."

The author notes that "Robinson is working to build an opposition to the curriculum, which he characterizes as divisive and anti-American. In a petition—that by Wednesday afternoon had nearly 30,000 signatures—he argued that the courses are designed to "indoctrinate our students against our great country."

In short, he's not against education, he's against propaganda and the indoctrination of leftist views into very young and malleable minds.    

To be or to do.  Which way will you go? - Col. John Boyd

Diversity Without Accomplishment is Philosophy Without Form and Incompetence Without Consequence - Rich Kozlovich

The Pathetic End Point of Racial Sensitivity Training

This is America—we have the right to speak freely and live without ancestral racial guilt. 

By Paul Bradford October 10, 2020

 

President Trump was grilled during his first debate with Joe Biden over his war against critical race theory training. Moderator Chris Wallace framed it as “racial sensitivity training” when he asked Trump why he banned the left-wing indoctrination in federal agencies.

Trump rightly called the training racist, un-American, and a “radical revolution.” He did, however, fail to specify who the training is racist towards. (Pssst… it’s white people.) “We have to go back to the core values of this country. They were teaching people that our country is a horrible place, it’s a racist place, and they were teaching people to hate our country, and I’m not gonna allow that,” Trump said.

Former Vice President Joe Biden replied “no one is doing that” and then proceeded to call Trump a “racist.” He also bizarrely claimed the president looks down on “Irish Catholics like me.” In his old age, Biden must’ve mistaken Trump for Bill the Butcher—the president is far from a Know-Nothing.

Christoper Rufo, who’s done incredible work exposing CRT training, does a good job of explaining the basics of this pernicious phenomenon and why Americans should care about it. “To any fair-minded observer, these are not ‘racial sensitivity trainings,’ as Mr. Wallace described them at the debate,” he writes in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “They are political indoctrination sessions. While this misrepresentation is a disappointment, it isn’t a surprise. Progressive activists and their media enablers routinely manipulate words to conceal the truth: Violent riots have become ‘mostly peaceful protests’ and ‘defund the police’ has become ‘reimagine public safety.’”..........To Read More......

 

 

Strangers in our Homeland

October 11, 2020 By Dale A. Fitzgibbons

America is the product of centuries of evolutionary political thought centered on natural human rights. Radical leftists now assault this land its patriots love, turning it into a place they scarcely recognize.

A revolutionary declaration.

Two hundred forty-four years ago the world experienced a singular and unparalleled transformative

It was 1776 and the start of the birthing of the American Union, founded on exacting principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence. These principles were a bold repudiation of the dominant organizing schema of nation-states, principalities, kingdoms, and empires, as they had existed since the dawn of history. It was the American Revolution.

There was, of course, the physical revolution, the revolt that started a year before at Lexington and Concord, when a volunteer militia confronted the crack soldiery of Britain’s world-class seasoned army. That conflict was fought with steel, gunpowder, lead, blood, and bravery. But the real revolution was an idea, articulated in these words: 

 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed......................

 The snake invades the garden

 First it was the soft socialism of progressivism that infiltrated the American consciousness with utopian promises of comfort and wealth for the masses through social engineering and centralized economic control. It was political snake oil, whispering seductively that economic happiness might be attainable without actually having to invest sweat equity to pursue it.

This softened the American psyche, ripening it for attack by the Cultural Marxists, with their nihilistic pseudo-religion, Critical Theory. The proponents of this noxious movement seek to destroy every institution, tradition, and principle that made America successful, and by any means necessary. In today’s tumultuous times, they have established a beachhead, shoving their morally-inverted Brave New World of good is bad, bad is good, legal is abusive, illegal is just, fairness is unfair, and unfairness is reasonable into the minds of the gullible. The malignancy has swept the academic world, the news media, the entertainment industry, the ruling establishment, and the power-crazed Democratic Party.

“America as founded is fundamentally corrupt, racist, and evil,” goes the Big Lie preached by these demagogues and parroted by their throngs of useful idiots. Its system of economic and personal freedom for all must be torn down and rebuilt as a bastion of socialism and radical egalitarianism ............. We have become strangers in a caricature of our homeland.............To Read More....

Against Wokeness

Conservatives must understand the threat posed by critical race theory.

Christopher F. Rufo September 16, 2020

President Trump recently issued an executive order prohibiting federal agencies from using “critical race theory” as part of their personnel-training programs. The president acted in response to my reporting exposing the use of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training courses in federal agencies. These programs, based on a neo-Marxist ideology that originated in law schools a generation ago, purport to expose and correct “unconscious racial bias” and “white privilege” among their employees. Critical race theory treats “whiteness” as a moral blight and maligns all members of that racial group as complicit in oppression. Critical race theory now forms the basis of personnel-training programs around the country, from corporate America and universities to churches and nonprofits.

The racial narrative that underlies these initiatives poses a grave threat to the ideal of colorblind justice under the law enshrined in the American constitutional system. Yet, despite its growing reach and cultural influence, and its role in motivating the Black Lives Matter and Antifa-led riots over the last three months, critical race theory has gone largely unchallenged by conservative leaders. Many have been slow to oppose the radical demands of groups such as BLM, either out of fear of being labelled racists or because of ignorance about the ideological agenda of these groups. Instead, conservatives have continued to “fight the last war” against the familiar enemies of cultural relativism or tax-and-spend liberalism, not recognizing that a new, virulent form of radicalism now animates the American Left.......To Read More....

 

Will Trump finally put a stop to the America-hating 1619 project?

September 7, 2020 By Andrea Widburg

On Friday, the Trump administration stopped federal agencies from using taxpayer dollars to force employees to attend anti-white critical race theory seminars.  He's now eying even bigger fish: Trump has promised that the Department of Education is looking into schools that have integrated the 1619 Project into their curricula so he can withhold federal funds from those schools.  "Looking into" is not the same as doing something, but it's a good start.

The New York Times' Nikole Hannah-Jones came up with the idea of the 1619 Project, which seeks to "reframe" American history to mark the year 1619 as the "true founding" rather than 1776 (the Declaration of Independence) or 1783 (when Britain surrendered to the Americans). Her choice of year is based upon the fact that the first Africans were brought to America as slaves in the year 1619.  Thus, the 1619 Project has as its purpose cementing slavery as America's original sin.

Hannah-Jones has admitted that the project has nothing to do with actual history but is, instead, a form of "journalism" to change "the national narrative:..........To Read More....

Trump daring Dems to defend 'critical race theory' and 1619 project as he moves to suspend indoctrination in schools and govt agencies

Trump is goading Dems into the trap of defending racist, anti-white brainwashing.

September 7, 2020 By Thomas Lifson

Democrats have made implicit promises to the radicals whose active support they need that they will back aggressive compulsory brainwashing sessions demonizing Caucasians and the American founding as fundamentally and inherently racist. A memorandum from OMB director Russell Vought three days ago began the pushback and laid a trap for them:

The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions. Accordingly, to that end, the Office of Management and Budget will shortly issue more detailed guidance on implementing the President's directive. In the meantime, all agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on "critical race theory/ "white privilege," or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil. In addition, all agencies should begin to identify all available avenues within the law to cancel any such contracts and/or to divert Federal dollars away from these un American propaganda training sessions.

 These trainings are deeply unpopular. See, for instance, this tweet (hat tip: Taylor Day): To Read More

Why did it take so long?

September 5, 2020 by Paul Mirengoff in Leftism, Race, Trump 

  It’s great news, as John says, that the Trump administration has issued a memorandum barring all federal agencies from “training” their employees in critical race theory or white privilege. However, it’s fair to ask why such a memorandum was issued so late in President Trump’s first term. As the memorandum notes, “executive branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda.” Why didn’t the administration put an end to it more promptly?

I don’t think Trump is to blame. He can’t be expected to know what kind of training is being performed by the various agencies. The memorandum implies that the noxious training programs in question didn’t come to his attention until recently, and I assume that’s the case.

Cabinet members aren’t to blame either, at least not directly. There’s no reason why they should occupy themselves reviewing employee training programs. They have bigger fish to fry.

However, I would expect some of the political appointees below the agency head level to get wind of the training being offered their employees. And I would think it’s the responsibility of political appointees at the Office of Management and Budget, which issued the memorandum halting the radical training, to know about this. After all, as the memorandum states, millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent indoctrinating federal employees on how inherently “racist” America is..........To Read More.....

President Trump's Executive Order Ends Melanin Privilege And Left wing Historical Revisionism

By Andrew G. Benjamin —— Bio and Archives--September 6, 2020

Trump’s EO ( Executive Order) puts an end to the politically correct mandated/forced indoctrination of employees at the federal level; it scuttles the grievance industry made prominent for the last three decades by the racists and supremacists Al $harpton, Je$$e Jack$on, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, John Lewis, Elihjah Cummings, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and their Congressional Black Caucus & Company.

This program benefitted from making White Lives Matter Less; promoted by leftwing media and financed by the corporations that pledged allegiance to Melanin Lives Matter More. Too, the Executive Order ends Critical Race Theory and the Melanin Privilege promoted by the New York Times and its media associates to win control of America by dividing the nation. It puts an end to the vile piece of historical revisionism in vogue these days that also won the Pulitzer Prize for a pack of lies. It won, by denying credit to the Founders, Pilgrims and Pioneers, and rather, giving credit to those who had nothing to do with the nation’s funding or its success.

The EO sets a trend and a standard by putting Political Correctness on universal notice as we’ll witness the Crying Rooms and Safe Spaces shrink to oblivion, as they will no longer get a free pass from criticism and ridicule...............To Read More....

A Critical Race Tale Told by Leftist Idiots Signifying Nothing

Daniel Greenfield - August 04, 2020 

 

In 1932, the Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on Shakespeare’s birthday with President Herbert Hoover and Robert Frost in attendance. The Library would house the world's largest collection of Shakespeare First Folios, and and hundreds of thousands of volumes gathered across the centuries.

"In almost unbelievable fullness and richness, we assembled books, pamphlets, documents, manuscripts, relics, curios," James Quincy Adams Jr, its first director, wrote. "The library is thus more than a mere library; it is also a museum of the Golden Age of Elizabeth, and a memorial to the influence that Shakespeare has exerted upon the world's culture."

These days, the Folger Shakespeare Library has a new mission. And it isn’t Shakespeare.

After George Floyd died during a confrontation with police, the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library declared that, "the fight against racial injustice is essential to what we do as an institution."

What does Floyd have to do with Shakespeare and what does racism have to do with the Folger Library?

In the Soviet Union or Mao's China, every subject, no matter how abstruse, had to be studied through the lens of Marxism-Leninism or Maoism. Shakespearean characters, according to the Communists, were revolutionary figures, and were trying to solve the "central problems" of a "bourgeois society."

But what the Communists did to Shakespeare was nothing compared to the Folger Library.

The Folger Shakespeare Library, once known for being able to display medieval lutes, classic playbills, and theatrical costumes, is now hosting Critical Race Conversations.

The Critical Race Conversations are the outcome of a formerly respected institution declaring that diversity is "central" to its mission with a focus on race, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

Its current fellows include the likes of Wan-Chuan Kao, who claims to be a "queer medievalist of color" and applies Robin DiAngelo's racist White Fragility tract to characters in Chaucer turning pale.

The Critical Race Conversations are built around Critical Race Theory, a Marxist idea taking root in an institution founded by a Standard Oil executive, which reduces all human society to racial tribalism.

Much like Soviet analyses of Shakespeare, the current crop have nothing to say about the Bard, and, like their Communist counterparts, they don’t especially care about the Bard. Communist academics was roughly divided between censored scholars who knew that the only way they could discuss their favorite subject was by cloaking it in Communist jargon, and hacks who knew that they could get through any topic by reciting clichés about class, bourgeois society, and the inevitable triumph of Communism.

There’s still enough academic freedom that the racialist hacks inevitably fall into the latter category. They don’t know anything about the subjects they’re stomping over and they don’t remotely care. And anyone objecting to the jackboots on the folio will be accused of white privilege, fragility, and racism.

And so, the Folger Shakespeare Library, or its name, currently being used by institution with all the intellectual credibility of a Communist academic explaining that Hamlet was an indictment of capitalism, presented, “The Sound of Whiteness, or Teaching Shakespeare’s ‘Other ‘Race Plays’ in Five Acts.”

What other “race plays” you might be wondering.

One of the two participants in this farce, Jennifer Lynn Stoever is a white woman who writes about hip-hop, and the other, David Sterling Brown, is a Shakespeare critical race studies scholar, who apparently insists that Cleopatra is black and accuses Antony of racism. If you know anything about Greek and Roman history, you officially know more than Dr. David Sterling Brown.

A summary of Brown's lecture includes nonsense like, “Caesar taking advantage of Cleopatra’s black body for profit” and Cleopatra committing suicide to reject "the white supremacy of Caesar".

Brown also denounces the bigotry of Shakespeare critics who failed to hear the “canonization of sexual violence against black men” in the Merchant of Venice. That one might have made even Shakespeare scratch his head since Brown is referring to the Prince of Morocco, the ruler of an Arab country who is described as “tawny”, and whose sexual violence consists of being rejected by Portia. Like all her suitors.

But in Soviet Shakespeare studies, you didn’t need to know anything except that Communism was good and America was evil, in its modern academic counterpart all you have to know is that whiteness is evil and blackness is good, and everything and anything consists of the former oppressing the latter.

Critical race studies in Shakespeare just consists of inventing black characters and their oppression. Paint over Arab and Greek characters as black and the rest of the sophomoric dualism all but writes itself.

Emily Folger, a Shakespeare scholar in her own right, and the wife of the Folger Library's founder, who helped subsidize the building, described the Bard as "one of the wells from which we Americans draw our national thought, our faith and our hope.”

But the Folger Library now aims to teach Americans despair.

The Folger Library's Shakespeare Quarterly, once a good source for scholarly material, is now filled with identity politics detritus like “Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race”, and “Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender”.

The latter includes a sentence that insists, "we must help initiate discussions of race and whiteness, especially in Renaissance classrooms, where students may least expect it."

The real purpose isn’t Shakespeare: it’s the tedious struggle sessions of political indoctrination.

The dawn of the computer age gave us the term GIGO or Garbage In, Garbage Out. The premise of GIGO was that the process was good, but the material was flawed. Social justice academia reverses the equation. The material may be good as gold, but it always comes out as garbage on the other end because the process is fundamentally bad and all it does is turn everything into bad copies of itself.

Academia has become a system for feeding anything from the body of human knowledge into an idiot fax machine that turns it into racial dualism. The process isn’t analytical, it is, ironically, colonialism.

Take one of America’s national intellectual treasures and the greatest playwright in history, and then colonize them by replacing the richness of their scholarship and ideas with the same generic cant as every other academic field, and what you have is the intellectual equivalent of McDonalds.

Critical race studies has nothing to say about anything outside itself. Its meta-analysis is really an echo chamber and the only thing its lens sees is its own reflection in the mirror. Academics turn to it, not because it might reveal new unexpected insights, but because they know exactly what they’ll get.

A critical race reading of Shakespeare isn’t daring and shocking, as its perpetrators like to pretend, it’s another tedious outpost of the franchise that has gobbled up academia, politics, and the entire culture. Once you know it’s there, it has nothing new to say. It isn’t breaking new ground, but dressing up old pieties in ruffs and hose, or spacesuits, togas, and any other costume that covers its nakedness.

Once upon a time, class readings were provocative and shocking. And then they became as exciting as a Soviet machine shop. What had once been a revolutionary idea had become a set of ossified clichés coming down the assembly line of a totalitarian system justifying its abuses with revolutionary slogans.

The Soviet elite turned to racial critiques to invigorate their political messages. Our own leftist elites likewise turn to racial radicalism every time they sense that their propaganda is growing stale.

They dress up the same old clichés in a racial message in the hope that it will buy them another year.

The Folgers had no children. They collected everything of Shakespeare that they could with the vision of building the Shakespeare Library. And, even out of the ashes of the Depression, it rose. And now, fell.

The Folger Shakespeare Library no longer has anything to say about Shakespeare, but many of the same things to say about race and leftist politics. It offers the same clichés that countless institutions in its vicinity and around the country have on tap at every level making it hopelessly redundant.

An institution about the world’s greatest playwright has a reason to exist, but yet another social justice outpost with Shakespeare’s name on it, a dead white man who must be denounced as a racist, doesn’t. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s lighted fools strut and fret, telling their ideological idiocy, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing except the destruction of everything that their radical politics touch.

 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

“White Fragility” Comes to Washington

Profiteering race theorists expand their footprint in the federal bureaucracy.

 

Christopher F. Rufo July 18, 2020

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Reprinted with permission from the City Journal.   I recommend subscribing to their e-mail alerts. 

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Critical race theory—the academic discourse centered on the concepts of “whiteness,” “white fragility,” and “white privilege”—is spreading rapidly through the federal government. Last month, a private diversity consultant, Howard Ross, conducted a training for federal financial agencies called “Difficult Conversations about Race in Troubling Times,” which asked white employees at the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the National Credit Union Association, and the Officer of the Comptroller to pledge “allyship amid the George Floyd Tragedy.”

According to whistleblower documents, the training begins with the premise that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” and have internalized “fairly consistent narratives about race” that “don’t support the dismantling of racist institutions.” Therefore, the trainers argue, white federal employees must “struggle to own their racism” and “invest in race-based growth.”

“White managers” are asked to create “safe spaces” where black employees can explain “what it means to be Black” and be “seen in their pain.” White employees are instructed to “provide unconditional solidarity,” remain silent, and “sit in the discomfort” of their own racism. If any conflicts arise, the trainers insist that whites “don’t get to decide when someone is being too emotional, too rash, [or] too mean” and cannot protest if a person of color “responds to their oppression in a way [they] don’t like.”

Ross, who created the training, is a fixture in what can be called the “diversity-industrial complex.” Based on a review of federal contract data, since 2006, he has billed the federal government more than $5 million for diversity trainings, seminars, and materials. His biggest year was 2011, when he billed the General Services Administration $3 million for “consulting services” and NASA $500,000 for “power and privilege sexual orientation workshops.”

It’s somewhat distasteful, though crucial, to disclose that Ross is white. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history but has positioned himself as an expert in “neuro-cognitive and social science research,” spending the past three decades selling “unconscious bias,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility.” Ironically, though, Ross has used his own privilege to enrich himself at taxpayers’ expense. In the language of his own discourse, he has monetized collective black pain to create individual white profit.

Incredibly, Ross and his likeminded colleagues have expanded their footprint under the conservative Trump administration. Based on a review of federal contract data, since Trump’s inauguration, Ross has conducted at least 17 trainings for federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, the National Institute of Health, and the Office of the Attorney General.Since Trump’s inauguration, Ross has conducted at least 17 trainings for federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, the National Institute of Health, and the Office of the Attorney General. The permanent bureaucracy understands that it can ignore the policies and priorities of any one administration, while building institutional power according to its own ideological agenda. The diversity consultants and their bureaucratic enablers want to convert “everyone in the federal government” to the work of “antiracism,” a concept that, in their vision, does not signify colorblindness but rather an aggressive new racialist ideology. The trainings make clear its assumptions and prescriptions.

As Treasury Department documents reveal, the new directives won’t be confined to the workplace. At the end of the training, Ross instructs federal employees to “talk to [their] children about race,” because “bias begins to take shape in our brains around 3 years old.” It’s easy to see where it goes from here: a nonstop sequence of diversity seminars, trainings, and curricula, from preschool to grad school and beyond.

This is the ultimate vision of critical race theorists: the creation of a new, radical political consciousness. The benefit is two-fold: advance the cause of critical race theory and create lifetime employment for the consultant class. Ross and others will prosper.

What can be done? First, the Senate Finance Committee should immediately launch an investigation into the Treasury Department’s training and Ross’s massive contracts. Second, Trump should issue an executive order banning federal agencies from teaching the toxic principles of critical race theory, race essentialism, and neo-segregationism. And finally, the public should brace for a long war against the diversity-industrial complex and its enablers.

Christopher F. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. He’s directed four documentaries for PBS, including his new film, America Lost, which tells the story of three “forgotten American cities.” Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

The Racialist ‘Craniometer’

Thoughts following a presentation on Critical Race Theory and Intersectional Theory at a Baptist conference.

Mark Coppenger July 21, 2019

At a recent gathering of Baptists, an adept assured us that Critical Race Theory and Intersectional Theory supplied us with “analytical tools” offering us “selective insights” for employment in our quest to “understand multifaceted social dynamics.” We just had to be careful to not receive these theories as “transcendent ideological frameworks” that could be “absolutized as … worldview[s],” displacing allegiance to the teachings of Scripture. Most of us were puzzled, even skeptical. But what did we know?..........

First, what exactly is the theory in CRT? We have germ theory in biology (with toxic microbes), molecular theory in chemistry (with electrons), and plate tectonic theory in geology (with continental drift). These supply narratives about how people might get TB, build a nuclear plant, or decide, as seismophobes, to leave California.

As scientific theories, they’re supposed to be testable and falsifiable. Alas, by these standards, social science theories are notoriously loose, more like tinted goggles one might choose to wear, with lenses designed to filter out certain rays..........In the case of CRT, the narrative says essentially that people of color are in a terrible fix, thanks to the historic and continuing activity of white folks............

Finally, let me suggest that Critical Race Theory is a highly uncritical theory, for the reasons given above, but also for what it presumes to promise. Implicit is the claim that it provides a path to well-being, when it actually generates more misery for all ethnicities involved.

It operates like a Ponzi scheme, with big payoffs for those who get in early in terms of acclaim, employment, publication, and platform opportunities. But those who get the impression that it is a reliable path to self- and social esteem and the satisfaction they bring, are in for a big, sad surprise. Or, to put it otherwise: “Get woke, and get took.”............To Read More...