Formerly Respected Organizations; Now Just Foot Soldiers Of Leftist Orthodoxy Enforcement

January 22, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

 As previously mentioned here, I’m currently involved in a legal case where my client — the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council — seeks to compel EPA to reconsider and revoke the 2009 action by which the agency claimed to determine that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” constitute a “danger to human health and welfare.” That agency action could well be the single most absurd and destructive thing that the U.S. government has ever done in its 234 year history. The “Endangerment Finding” is the regulatory foundation that underlies all of the more than one hundred initiatives of the Biden Administration to destroy our energy infrastructure, drive up the cost of gasoline, heat, and electricity, and leave the American people impoverished and freezing in the dark.

It goes without saying that the government, under direction from the Biden White House and environmental zealots within EPA, opposes our efforts with every resource at its disposal. But here’s what does not go without saying: a collection of non-profit organizations who would otherwise be strangers to the litigation has nevertheless sought to “intervene” in the case to support the position of the government. With perhaps one exception, these are organizations whose core missions would seem to be far removed from the question of whether CO2 or other “greenhouse gases” do or do not cause noticeable global warming. So why do they get involved here? They have totally lost track of their supposed missions, and have become just another collection of foot soldiers in the enforcement of the leftist orthodoxy of the moment.

Here is a link to the brief submitted by these “intervenors” on January 18. (The link goes to the federal court system’s PACER website, which requires subscription.). The cover page of the brief identifies the organizations that seek to intervene: American Lung Association, American Public Health Association, Appalachian Mountain Club, Clean Air Council, Clean Wisconsin, National Parks Conservation Association, National Resources Council of Maine, and Natural Resources Defense Council.

OK, the Natural Resources Defense Council is open and upfront about so-called “climate change” advocacy being central to its mission. If you choose to support that organization, you know what you are getting into.

But how about the other seven? Let’s consider a few.

The American Lung Association by its name certainly gives the impression that its mission entirely relates to lungs and their health. Go to their website, and that impression is only reinforced. The headline is “Our Vision Is a World Free of Lung Disease.” Prominently featured initiatives relate to tobacco, radon, and Covid-19. What do CO2 and “greenhouse gases” have to do with lung disease or lung health? The answer is nothing. The plea for donations is headed “Help Us Create a World Free of Lung Disease.” Well, it turns out that these people are taking the donor money and devoting it to the current fashionable cause of having the government use its coercive powers to undermine the U.S. energy system.

Similarly, you might think from the name that the mission of the American Public Health Association has something to do with public health. Maybe at one time it did. Go to the website, and it’s a collection of current left-wing talking points. “Abortion is essential healthcare,” “Creating health equity is a guiding priority and core value of APHA,” “Racism hurts the health of our nation.” There is unabashed vaccine advocacy, without any mention that some vaccines might have serious side effects or might not be right for everyone. OK, but at least all of those arguably have at least something to do with “public health.” CO2 in the atmosphere has exactly nothing to do with “public health,” at least as that term would be commonly understood.

The Appalachian Mountain Club? These are the people who maintain the Appalachian Trail and other such pieces of outdoor infrastructure. Their mission statement at the top of the website says that “we advocate for science-based policies that advance clean energy, air and water quality, and land protection.” Could it make any possible difference to use of these trails if average temperatures went up a couple of degrees a hundred years from now? No. But somehow their mission too has crept into spending donor money to hire lawyers to support the government in its coercive efforts to ban your gas stove and drive up your cost of electricity.

As if the mission creep isn’t embarrassing enough to these organizations, they then take it upon themselves to try to help the government by getting our organization thrown out of court on the technicality of “standing.”

The doctrine of “standing” requires that a party seeking relief in federal court must demonstrate that it has or will suffer some sort of concrete injury. It’s a reasonable enough requirement, but actually very flexible, as shown by the fact that standing is universally recognized for anyone claiming to be harmed by damage to the environment, no matter how minimal or general. Will my local river be warmed 2 degrees by release of water that cools a nuclear power plant? That’s clearly sufficient to convey “standing.”

In our case, the clients allege standing based on electricity bills soaring as a result of efforts to achieve reduced carbon emissions from electricity production. There are thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars at stake for every individual in the country. That allegation is backed by extensive showings from places like California, Germany and the UK of electricity prices doubling, tripling and more as fossil fuel plants have been closed and wind and solar have been added to the system. All of this is extremely well-known and public. But more importantly, what expertise do the likes of the American Lung Association, American Public Health Association, Appalachian Mountain Club, et al., have in this subject? None whatsoever. But that does not keep them from weighing in. From page 7 of Intervenors’ Brief:

Several outcomes regarding generation mix and electricity prices are at least equally plausible. By many measures, renewable energy sources including solar and wind produce the cheapest electricity. . . .

It’s pure ignorance. Bottom line: pretty much any organization today that is not explicitly right wing has become a foot soldier in the enforcement of leftist orthodoxy. I don’t know why this has to be, but that’s where we are.

Lack of Attention Allowed Special Interests to Take Over Schools: Journalist Luke Rosiak

By Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek April 13, 2022

Investigative journalist and author of the book “Race To the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education,” said he started to notice a disturbing trend of special interest groups taking over the public schools to implement their radical agenda prior to the pandemic, which they only advanced further during the lockdowns.  “I basically saw that something was coming, that schools mattered, and that no one was paying attention to them. And because of that, special interests had really started colonizing these schools,” Rosiak told EpochTV’s American Thought Leaders program in a recent interview. “It was almost everywhere.”..................To Read More....

 

Parents Hold All the Power in Reclaiming America’s Schools

By Casey Ryan April 12, 2022

With schools teaching children critical race theory and regressive gender ideologies, parents are increasingly looking into opportunities to fight back against this indoctrination now occurring in America’s education system. Parents are understandably upset that educators are teaching their children absurd ideas that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago. Fortunately, these parents have more options than ever to fight back against this radicalization plaguing America’s schools. 

Parents are the most powerful force we have in securing the future of our nation’s children, and we have seen time and time again in recent months how they can channel that power to fight and change America’s course for the better. We have especially seen this in states like Virginia, Florida, and Texas. Parents of different backgrounds and political persuasions have joined together in an effort to eliminate the relatively new dangerous ideas that political activists and ideologues are implementing and pushing into America’s schools.........To Read More.....

 

Corporate Safe Spaces: How Racial Affinity Groups Radicalize Companies

Daniel Greenfield October 27, 2021

 Workplace chat software like Slack is probably the single most effective tool for making companies go woke. Organizing workers was a difficult challenge in companies that did not have unions. But while companies closely monitored union organizing, they actively encouraged the use of workplace chat software that made it all too easy for leftists to network, identify opponents, get them fired, and use those incidents to radicalize the company.

The second most effective tool is the identity politics affinity group.

Affinity groups or ERGs have become a popular tool by HR departments to organize internal woke caucuses. Corporate affinity groups are a counterpart of campus student groups and were promoted as a way to enable the same kind of experience in the workplace. Identity politics student groups, usually dominated by students and faculty from identity politics studies departments, were the biggest players in campus radicalization and protests. Affinity groups replicated black, Latino, and gay student groups in corporations with executives as their faculty sponsors. The executives were often picked based on their own student activist backgrounds.

During the campus wars, some conservatives had dismissed the student protests as an unreal university bubble. “Just wait until they get into the real world and have to find jobs,” they said.

But campus radicalism had always been meant as a training ground for institutional radicalization. The student activists were being taught how to take over government agencies, companies, and any organization they become part of using internal networking and political pressure. The students didn’t change to accommodate the workplace, instead workplaces changed to accommodate them, making the activist culture a part of corporate culture.

The same system that had ousted conservative faculty, intimidated conservative speakers, and transformed courses had been copied and pasted into the corporate workplace. On college campuses, students were the customers, but workplace affinity group members were employees. Except that corporations began treating the affinity groups as stakeholders who became more important than the actual customers. Affinity groups applied internal pressure that ousted conservative employees and dropped conservative customers and businesses.

Much as student groups had advocated defunding investments in oil companies or Israel on college campuses, affinity groups pressured banks to drop firearms manufacturers and Republicans. Companies that refused faced internal revolts, staged resignations, and pressure on key investors and shareholders that would claim the jobs of CEOs and principled leaders.

The conquest of corporations was swift and effective because it utilized existing leftist revolutionary organizational principles that exploited new technologies while their victims, often liberal and conservative, failed to understand that the discontent, the demands, and the new entities and language invading the workplace were not some odd millennial trend, but part of a plan. Even now the backlash against wokeness has hardly come to terms with the infrastructure behind it, touching mainly on the stories of individuals who were purged for political offenses.

What the testimony of the victims neglects is an understanding of the machinery of the purges.

The affinity groups were not truly new, but their spread and pervasiveness has been breathtaking. Black, Latino, gay, and other identity politics affinity groups not only exist in most corporations but, as revealed in the Freedom Center’s recent booklet, Disloyal, in the military. They’ve become ubiquitous in the non-profit sector and across all levels of the government.

Officially, racial and sexual affinity groups are meant to make minorities more comfortable in the workplace, provide mentoring, and the favorable treatment that enables “diversity”. In practice affinity groups are widely used to advocate for political issues in the same way as minority leaders. Essentially, affinity groups embedded a Sharpton in every company and institution.

Affinity groups claim that they are structurally disadvantaged and that certain corporate moves make them feel “unsafe” or “threatened”. A key affinity group tactic is pressuring executives to state that the company suffers from “systemic racism” and that minorities are at risk. This is the familiar campus safe space ethos transplanted to some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies.

Once the affinity groups have established the need for corporate safe spaces, they begin pressuring companies to impose political tests on all employees and fire those who disagree. Affinity groups begin by establishing their oppressed credentials before pivoting to become the oppressors. Once executives begin surrendering to them, they’ve established that the company is a dangerous environment for an identity politics group and the leadership “needs to do better.”

While affinity groups typically tend to claim that they represent black, female, or gay employees, they’re just another embedded leftist front group which silences or suppresses those employees who are there for mentorship or work instead of politics. Where unions at least had democratic vestiges, affinity groups have little to none. Like the NAACP, the HRC, or any number of advocacy groups that claim to represent the voices of a group, which has no way of ratifying or removing their representation, affinity groups claim to represent a people as a political group.

And since affinity groups typically have the support of HR and executives, few employees are willing to dissent or speak out against them. Fortune 500 companies now routinely pressure their employees to join affinity groups, including pushing white employees into “white allies” groups for maximum political indoctrination in the workplace. This setup, not at all coincidentally, resembles the old “soviets” which the Bolsheviks began to use as their political power base.

Modern wokes are using the same basic methodology as 19th century revolutionaries but with the added benefit of the internet and smart devices to provide them with far superior coordination. The underlying objective though remains the familiar process of horizontal consolidation of power within an organization, a group of organizations, and then an entire industry, and vertical consolidation across different organizations and industries.

Horizontal consolidation is how leftists took over specific university departments, entire fields of study, academic organizations, and then entire universities, and much of academia. The same process was also used to consolidate the field of education, and is being replicated everywhere from Big Tech to medicine. And, as discussed in Disloyal: the United States military.

Vertical consolidation might use the media, medical experts, and government officials to advance a particular program, or academia, Wall Street, and the clergy for another.

The basis for the mass censorship of conservatives was coordinated between the Justice Department, the media, and Big Tech. Such improbable alliances only seem unlikely until you understand that vertical consolidation transforms culturally incompatible organizations and industries into the components of a single machine whose true mission is that of the Left.

Leftists create cells within each organization. The members of those cells see themselves as members of the “resistance”, the term they embraced during the Trump administration, “working within the system” to achieve a total takeover of society. The old dream, the one advanced by Communist organizations, got a shot in the arm from the new possibilities for organizing and coordinating operatives. Before the internet, communications were a problem requiring in-person meetings, magazines and newsletters, but the rise of the internet, and then social media, and finally workplace chat enabled this brave new world and its social credit system.

The affinity groups merge traditional identity politics organizing with corporate workplaces. The Left has abandoned its old working class politics to focus on the upper middle class and it has accompanied its new base through student identity politics to their workplaces. The stereotypes of dysfunctional millennials unable to cope with adulthood led corporations to create frictionless workplaces that made the transition from college to corporate life as smooth as possible.

It’s also no coincidence that Big Tech, the arena where the top talent was guided into corporate campuses meant to replicate their old college campuses, is also the epicenter of safe spaces, radical politics, and affinity groups. The college dropouts who built Silicon Valley aimed to extend the college experience to the workplace with a casual atmosphere, free food, and all-night working hours. It’s no wonder Big Tech became the first corporate casualty of the Left.

But not the last. Corporate America, eager to jump on a new trend, is succumbing to the virus.

Conservatives were behind the curve on campus organizing. They’ve made up a great deal of ground on college campuses even as the generation that was organized is taking over the corporate workplace. And conservatives are once again behind on organizing the opposition.

Making matters more difficult is the insistence that identity politics affinity groups are apolitical, that their messages, whether Black Lives Matter or Trans Inclusion, are “above politics”, and that implementing these groups is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion which many organizations, from Kellogg’s cereal to the United States Space Force, have defined as central to their mission.

And so it will take a good deal more to crack workplace organizing than calls for equal time.

Workplace civil rights is about more than the right of employees to be free of political tests and indoctrination, it’s about more than denying the Left a space to organize and recruit. These initial considerations have to give way to the realization that an organization hijacked by the Left will horizontally and vertically consolidate to conquer organizations, industries, and the country.

A company will funnel money to leftist causes and deny services to conservatives. It will coordinate with other companies and create industry-wide standards that act as cartels. That means firearms manufacturers and gun stores will be denied loans and payment options, conservative candidates will be prevented from being heard on social media and accepting donations. Vocal conservatives won’t be able to buy or sell, have a bank account or a credit card, not to mention a job, or access any services that are mediated by major corporations.

The variety of companies that appear to be making independent decisions to deplatform, fire, and break ties with conservatives are actually acting as one nationwide woke cartel.

That’s not an alarmist prediction, but a growing everyday reality.

Corporations have adopted critical race theory, anti-racism, equity, and inclusion which, despite its name, insists that it is not enough to include if you do not also exclude. Exclusion, from the marketplace of ideas, from public and private spaces, from employment and finally life, has been equated to safety for the “oppressed” who cannot be safe without the power to oppress.

That is how the social credit system comes to America.

It took conservatives a while to embrace student free speech rights. The shift came with the delayed realization that campuses were no longer in a struggle between moderate administrations and student radicals, but radical administrations and student conservatives. Making that same shift with woke corporations purging conservative employees and customers may be a more painful process. And yet it is an absolutely necessary existential matter.

Conservatives could survive woke academia, but not a woke economy.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

Tags: Corporate America, Racism, recent

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

Christian Education and the Future of Western Culture

October 7, 2021 By Paul Krause

The war over education will be a defining issue for the next decade. Unfortunately, defeating Critical Hate Theory isn’t going to stop the poison that already infects our educational system. Beneath the veil of diversity, inclusion, and tolerance is the acidic educational philosophy that America is evil, that its values need destroyed, and that Western culture is irredeemable. That is what actually motivates progressive education: hatred of their culture and homeland.

Antonio Gramsci is the prophet of our educational discontent. Imprisoned by Mussolini in the 1920s, Gramsci wrote his famous Prison Notebooks explaining why the communist revolution didn’t occur in the very societies where it should have. Breaking with Marx’s economic politics, Gramsci articulated a view of cultural politics. The revolution failed, or didn’t occur, because the proletariat didn’t control any of the institutions of cultural power. This is what is called cultural hegemony.

Disciples of Gramsci emerged in the 1960s in Europe and America. They advocated a “long march through the institutions.” Their goal: to overthrow the bourgeois and Christian culture that dominated elite and secondary institutions throughout the West. Only in overturning the cultural ideals and values of their opponents could the revolutionaries disseminate their ideals to the next generation, secure cultural power, and use institutions to advance their revolutionary ideals.

Today’s proponents of Critical Race Theory, diversity, inclusion, and tolerance, and all the other buzzwords of multiculturalism are the heirs of Gramsci and his disciples. Their goal is nothing less than the overthrow of all the values of the previous generations that had organically flourished and grown to constitute Western civilization and its values of God, liberty, and equality. Of course, “God, liberty, and equality” as previously understood are masks for oppression, according to progressives.............To Read More....

The War on America by Twisted Logic

October 7, 2021 By Janet Levy  @ American Thinker 

We are living under a regime that's increasingly totalitarian.  And it is using an insidious strategy — call it disinformation, propaganda, gaslighting, indoctrination, or outright lying — to achieve the leftists' political and social goal of a "Great Reset" of America.  The regime's enforcers, or boosters, are the media, academia, and Big Tech, who together control the narrative with faked statistics, slanted semantics, and endless repetition.  They also deploy the psychological tactics of intimidation, shaming, and canceling.  At the center sits the government, but the chain of command — who dictates to whom — is often unclear.

"Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth" is a principle often attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.  In America today, "woke" social justice warriors are using a continuous barrage of lies to achieve their Machiavellian agenda.

Four recent, egregious lies come to mind.  In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a UCLA business school professor who has taught at the institution for forty years, was suspended for refusing a student's request to provide an easier exam for black students.  Black students, it was propounded, were emotionally distressed after the death of serial felon George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The email exchange between Klein and the student, which went viral, was deemed "hurtful," and the professor was unreasonably branded an "insensitive bigot."  Antonio  Bernardo, the school's dean, organized a smear campaign against Klein and sought permission to fire him.

Klein stood his ground, saying he was shocked by the student's request, which he found "deeply patronizing and offensive" to black students.  He also assessed, rightly, that granting the request would violate the California constitution's prohibition of "race-based preferences in public education."  But such has been the effect of woke indoctrination that, incomprehensibly, students called for his removal and gathered 20,000 signatures on a petition demanding that he be relieved of his teaching duties.  In its eagerness to be seen as woke in the current racially charged atmosphere, UCLA chose to ignore the abject harassment of its professor, sided with the crybullies, and suspended Klein.  Fortunately, an academic senate committee ruled that instructors are entitled to refuse requests to change grading schemes, and Klein was reinstated three weeks later.

But the retaliation against Klein and others continues.  The professor, who was denied a merit raise and is suing UCLA, says the controversy devastated his consultancy practice.  Apparently, businesses — like large numbers of college students and faculty — value being seen as woke over scholarship, justice, and integrity.

In another case, nodding to the nebulous concept of "cultural relativism," a federal judge in Detroit defended female genital mutilation (FGM), a procedure banned since 1996 in the U.S.  The judge, Bernard Friedman, in 2018 declared the ban on FGM unconstitutional, then (on Sep. 28, 2021) threw out the feds' case, accepting that the secretive procedure performed on nine minor girls, aged 7 to 12, was merely a "religious ritual."  The lead defendant, Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, denied performing FGM and referred to the procedure as benign "shaving" — whatever that means.  Federal prosecutors had acknowledged the existence of a "secret network of physicians" who were performing the ritual as "part of a religious obligation and cultural tradition" of the Dawoodi Bohra community, to which the girls, Dr. Nagarwala, and other accused belong.

Survivors of the procedure have described it as demonic.  They say they have physical and mental scars to show that it went beyond just "a nick" or "shaving," and that it amounted to "gender violence."  But even though the U.S. Constitution does not provide for absolute freedom of religion and deems certain religious practices crimes, Judge Friedman thought otherwise.  His 2018 decision declaring the ban unconstitutional had been appealed by the U.S. House of Representatives, and in 2021, the STOP FMG Act was signed into law, giving federal authorities more power to prosecute those who perform the procedure.  But with woke judges like Friedman at the gates, de facto FGM might well become permissible.

The third incident is about the debacle in Afghanistan................

Perhaps the most bizarre of logic-defying anomalies that are becoming commonplace is the National School Boards Association (NSBA)'s letter to the Biden administration demanding that anti-terrorist laws such as the PATRIOT Act be used against parents protesting against curriculum content and school mandates..............  Not unexpectedly, U.S. attorney general Merrick Garland has instructed the FBI to mobilize against dissenting parents.

The examples cited illustrate how the cultural Marxists' agenda has infiltrated our schools, universities, military, courts, and beyond...........To Read More...