David Barnhizer
A Stark Example of Linguistic Thought Control
All “revolutions” require an “enemy”, a “moral cause” that generates hate and envy, and a system by which slogans and propaganda can be transmitted to true believers and “social justice warriors”. This is what was done in creating the Soviet Revolution, the terrors of Maoist control in China using the young fanatics of the Red Guard, and in Nazi Germany where the Jews, Communists, and Gypsies were portrayed as “Demons”. This is far too close to what is taking place today in America with the “Whites”—particularly White males—relegated to the demonic class. The tragedy is that once this strategy is set in place and is successful, there is no “magic button” to turn off the hate that has been generated other than through repression.
"Mom, I’m a white male. Am I bad?”
“[M]y oldest son’s teacher recently drove him to tears after she vilified white males for their historical atrocities. With devastating effects, the teacher hammered a punitive and guilt-ridden theme about white males. When she concluded, my son tearfully beseeched my wife: "Mom, I’m a white male. Am I bad?” Schools also are separating students and parents into race based "affinity groups." One district sought to hold a meeting for participants to discuss racial issues and "respectfully requested that individuals only sign up for the intraracial conversations for the race that they identify with." Another district recently held discussions about race and segregated students into "white students" and "students of color."
National education institutions continue to push radical policies. The National Education Association argues that teachers must "advance racial and social justice in [their] communities and schools." Teachers, they argue, must oppose "colorblindness [and...] race-neutral policies and practices..." At a recent conference, one presenter told the audience: "If you don’t want to work for equity, get the f--k out of education."
Good schools and a quality education set our nation’s most prized assets—our curious and creative kids—on their course in life. It equips them with the tools they need to pursue their dreams and make their mark on the world. But sadly, many schools have injected education with radical politics and routinely violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. … Federal and state statutes prohibit such discrimination. … These laws stand for the proposition that in America, the law neither knows nor countenances different treatment based on skin color.
Yet, schools across the country routinely violate those laws and educate students to do so as well. They are teaching children that America and its institutions are systemically racist and that the only way to rectify this problem is to admit "white privilege" and support laws and policies that target people based on their race.” “State Attorneys General can help families get politics out of the classroom: State AGs should engage the education reform debate”, Ryan Owens, 10/1/21.
The Strategic Use of Politically-Invented Language
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Exposes Wokeism
as Seeking “Unchecked and Absolute Power”
"The main goal of the woke is to seek unchecked and absolute power, advancing from the academy and out into other institutions of society," Ali [said]. "In America, and the rest of the English-speaking world, it is no issue of any significance that we can discuss in any meaningful way without running into woke sabotage.” "One reason why it's difficult to pin down wokeism is that the theories of [philosophical] deconstruction are constantly expanding with grievance after grievance," Ali said. … ”If you can pin an idea, you can expose it… But if its meaning keeps shifting, with the grievance of the day, it becomes elusive. It's not social justice theory. Weirdly, though, it's not a theory at all… You can't treat it like other theories that is by taking it through the process of scrutiny for certification or verification.” Ali asserted that a "key element" of wokeism is the "contamination of language," pointing to its "lexicon" of terms like "microaggressions, safe spaces" and "equity." And that existing language is "policed" by the woke "to become purified of any perceived bigotry or injustice.” See, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali says wokeism has 'remarkable similarities' to White supremacy: 'The rotten idea of our time’: Hoover Institute scholar: 'If you think that White supremacy is the biggest domestic threat that we face... get a grip’”, Joseph A. Wulfsohn, 11/2/21.
Roger Kimball writes about the Orwellian strategy of the continual manipulation of language.
“Andrew Sullivan notes the prominent role that language—that is, the effort to police language—plays in the economy of coercion. “Revolutionaries,” he writes, “create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order.” … “And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible. You can’t keep up — which is the point. . . . The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.” “The Purity Spiral Turns, as Courage Goes Missing”, Roger Kimball, 6/28/20.
The irony is that a political movement that always claimed to pride itself on a dizzying range of “diversity” has created a single, non-diverse, monolithic cultural identity of “White”. It doesn’t matter where those “Whites” were born, how they were raised, what language they speak, what values and experiences they have had, their differing cultures and languages, or the economic and social conditions under which they live. In the “Twi-Light Zone” dimension of the most fanatical “Critical Race Theorists”—a propagandized weapon the New York Times writer Bret Stephens called “a theory in search of evidence”—ALL those they tar with the label “Whiteness” are the same. ALL are condemned to live their lives under the burdens of “Original Sin” and “Collective Guilt” imposed by the Critical Race Theory narrative. You can’t get more racist than that.
An “Oppressor” Identity Group such as represented by the Woke and “Crits”, no longer has due process or fairness in its game plan. The operative rule is “By Any Means Necessary”. The “transformative” struggle being driven by the “revolutionaries” is not about their target’s individual actions. Everything is focused on overcoming the opposing group. That is, in fact, why the claims of “Systemic” racism, “White Supremacy” and “Privilege” were first invented by those seeking to dismantle the existing political community and seize power.
The Movement needed to “go systemic” and condemn an entire system because the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s into the late 1970s had been significantly successful in alleviating much of the racism and gender discrimination that existed and created opportunity on a significant scale to the point that it was necessary to “invent” a new strategy of attack in order to continue the surge toward power. The tactical answer was to invent a new narrative that moved away from individual discriminatory actions and into the globalized arena of “system”, “privilege” and the like in which the targets who sought to challenge the new strategic narrative were forced into the dimension of having to “prove a negative” by essentially being put on the defensive in which the most they could do was respond “No It Isn’t” in cautioning against the Woke/Crit overwhelming condemnation of a total system of privilege that controls and governs all of society.
Such “logic” of justifying “collateral damage” imposed on people who did nothing to deserve it is one of the tragedies of Groupthink and Identity Group extremism. The powerful moral condemnation and twisted invention of what are claimed to be forms of “racism” and “racist” is being used as a weapon to obtain power, to control target groups, and to obtain power. The upshot of several decades of such Neo-Racist propaganda is that we now have been led to understand that a more evil and sinister group of people than whites has never before lived on Earth. This is particularly true in the case of “white men”.
The Condemnation of Purportedly “White Values” Harms the Very Children the Woke and CRT Advocates Claim to Be Helping
“Diversity”, “equity”, and “inclusion” are examples of the Orwellian strategy of linguistic cleansing. This includes “White supremacy”, “privilege”, “micro-aggression”, “insensitivity” and much more. Those who control language control society. You can of course ask without a preconceived strategic agenda, “Diversity of who and what?”, and “What exactly, or even almost, do you mean when you say “equity”, and being “Inclusive” covers a lot of ground. Are we talking about full and total inclusivity, or do you have something very specific in mind that excludes other kinds of diversity?”
The problem at this point is that if you do ask about the actual meaning of such terms, you are condemned as a “racist”. The real intent of the strategy is not only aimed at controlling and subjugating the “White” component of American society, but stripping “people of color” of the skills and values needed for them to do well within our society as proud and skilled members of what has for decades been striving to be a fairer and more just system.
College Professor Phoebe A. Cohen Apparently Hates Dead White Men
At base, the arguments being made that condemn the “White values” almost inevitably must be saying—“Whites are capable of doing these things better than minorities and they are using the organized and disciplined power of their minds to oppress those groups who apparently are not as capable of disciplined and deep thought.” This assertion is so horribly dangerous, stupid, cynical, Neo-racist, and wrong, that it truly “boggles the mind”. Those utilizing such arguments should be ashamed to the point of going away and isolating themselves on an island without contact with anyone other than other fascistic and ignorant “true believers”. Rich Lowry offers a perspective below.
“The New York Times ran a report on the canceling of University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot for his dissenting views on affirmative action. The paper quoted a Williams College geosciences professor, Phoebe A. Cohen, who supports Abbot’s shunning. She explained her dim view of academic freedom thusly: “This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.” Ah, yes, that poisoned fruit of the patriarchy — intellectual debate and rigor.
This idea isn’t new, even if Cohen expressed it in a memorably pithy and direct way. Of all the faddish notions blighting college campuses and the broader culture, it is among the most indefensible and self-destructive. Start with the fact that to reason is deeply human. Steven Pinker points out in his new book “Rationality” that one of the world’s oldest people, the San of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, don’t survive by happenstance. These hunter-gatherers make closely reasoned, evidence-based judgments about their prey; without the use of logic, they wouldn’t be successful. If someone told them they needed to give up all this reasoning and cede it to white males, they’d presumably react with fury and incomprehension. Needless to say, other cultures and civilizations are capable of great intellectual rigor. It doesn’t require endorsing the fashionable theories that the West invented nothing and rose to preeminence through colonialism and theft to acknowledge the historic achievements of China, India and the Islamic world.
The alternatives to intellectual debate and rigor are
superstition, personal preference, and sheer power.
“The beauty of reason is that it is open to everyone, and it’s a powerful tool of truth and justice. What would Frederick Douglass — whose career was based on using facts and logic to convince people they were wrong — make of the idea that intellectual rigor is a white male thing? The implication that women and minorities somehow aren’t as capable of rigorous thought as white males, or shouldn’t be as interested in it, is deeply insulting. This is taking one of the worst beliefs of the Western past, dressing it up in the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion, and pretending it’s somehow a blow for progress. What’s the alternative to intellectual debate and rigor? Superstition, personal preference and, ultimately, sheer power. It’s the latter that the woke critics of Western reason believe they can wield to crush their enemies, facts and logic be damned.” “Woke claim that ‘rational thinking’ is a white male thing is both insulting and absurd”, Rich Lowry, 10/26/21.
The use and abuse of language for political advantage is everywhere. One example, to its shame, is offered by the National Education Association. In endorsing Critical Race Theory in schools, the NEA pledged to fight against anti-CRT speech and to: “issue a study that “critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.” You can’t make this up, but at least the NEA has company. The Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian Institute, put up a poster a year or so ago stating that “white culture” includes things like “nuclear family,” “self-reliance,” “rigid time schedule” and “delayed gratification.” One critic responded the poster is “despicable”. The Museum quickly removed the poster. But the removal does not change the message that such values are supposedly possessed by a specific ethnic group—all Whites wherever found. That false racist narrative is designed to create a “revolutionary enemy” to energize “the struggle”.
Wokes and Crits Want to do away with the “White Oppressor’s” Tools, like “Rationalism, the Rule of Law, and Private Ownership of Property”
[GQ Pan writes in the Epoch Times] “Much of the presentation used terms and concepts of the Marxist “critical theory,” which views society through a lens of a power struggle between “oppressors” and the “oppressed.” As a result, almost anything, including the foundations of Western civilization—such as rationalism, the rule of law, and private ownership of property—can be considered tools of oppression, according to the theory. … “[First you] are intending to awaken [the kids] to the oppression that they aren’t aware of but that they are actively participating in,” a part of the presentation reads. “Then how do we ‘destroy, dismantle’ those systems?” “[We] have to be extra careful about what is being said, since we can’t just say something controversial now that we’re in people’s homes” [because of remote learning] Pacheco’s presentation reads.”
The “Purity Spiral”
Roger Kimball offers an important insight into strategies of deliberately shifting the meaning of open-textured language operates. He explains and offers examples of “white supremacy”, “people who menstruate” as opposed to “women”, “oppression”, “racist” and “structural racism”.
“The journalist Gavin Haynes has a great phrase for a familiar and disturbing phenomenon: the purity spiral. “A purity spiral occurs,” he writes, “when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation. The result is a moral feeding frenzy.” … Thus it invariably happens that the purity spiral is also a search for enemies, a concerted effort to divide the world between the tiny coterie of the blessed and the madding crowd of the damned. The game, Haynes notes, “is always one of purer-than-thou.” Freud put his finger on one aspect of the purity spiral in his discussion of “the narcissism of small differences.” Tocqueville sifted through the same psychological sands when he noted that the more equal people become, the more sensitive they are to whatever small differences remain.” “The Purity Spiral Turns, as Courage Goes Missing”, Roger Kimball, 6/28/20.
Open-ended words can be made to mean whatever their advocates intend at the moment, although they also can change the meaning whenever it suits the agenda. Like Ibram Kendi’s “Anti-Racism”, many of the words sound good in the abstract, or when trumpeted by impassioned speakers filled with messianic zeal. But matters we need to look at closely include what are they intended to mean, and, given their loose and open-ended texture, how they are being used and interpreted? What do they deliberately exclude, as well as include? This danger is suggested in the following passage voiced by Jason Riley.
“While [the “Prophet” of Antiracism, Ibram X Kendi, nee Henry Rogers] Kendi is using trendier language —“antiracism,” “implicit bias,” etc. — critical race theory amounts to little more than a fancy argument for affirmative action, and always has. The theory comes out of the legal academy, and early proponents argued that race, ethnicity and gender should be used as academic credentials in hiring and promoting professors. It’s less a serious academic discipline than a hustle. It posits that racial inequality today is the sole fault of whites and the sole responsibility of whites to solve — through racial preferences for blacks. … Ultimately, it’s about blaming your problems on other people — based on their race — which might be the last thing we should be teaching our children.” Jason Riley.
Ask the “Revolutionaries” to Provide Specifics on What “Higher” Values They Offer to Replace the “Systemically Racist” “White” Values
Take a moment to think about what the mantras of “White guilt”, “systemic racism”, and “White privilege” actually do. Consider for just a moment what it means to condemn values and ideals such as “Individualism”, “being goal oriented”, “insisting on reason and rational thought”, being “self-confident”, “seeking answers”, “believing in objectivity”, having a “sense of urgency”, “prizing reading and writing”, “worshipping the written word”, saying America is a “land of opportunity”, believing that “capability” and “merit” are legitimate factors in who gets jobs, “working hard”, or not being “humble”. These are all attacked as White Supremacy values and as automatically racist.
What is most amazing is that the “Woke, Crit, Radical Progressive Triumvirate” is getting away with spewing their garbage. The real truth is that demagogues such as Ibram Kendi are the ultimate racists. What is unfolding is one of the most cynical, intellectually vacant, and morally asinine assertions I have ever encountered. We are letting them make incredibly bad faith claims without treating those claims with the contempt they deserve. The tragedy is that most people are refusing to simply come out and say that “the Woke/CRT Emperor has no clothes”.
If such alleged “White values” such as those listed above are keys to “White supremacy” and “White privilege”, and we honestly believe those to be bad and oppressive, then we should abandon them and adopt other values. But what are those new values we must adopt? Should we reject the nuclear family, as was stated in BLM, Inc.’s online organizational statement? Just how “bad” dependence on the nuclear family structure is for healthy societies deserves some discussion. This is because social and economic data demonstrate that strong families create significant advantages for society and family members.
Is the fact that strong, intact families often create advantages for the people who grow up in such supportive contexts be condemned as “privilege” that others produced in less stable and supportive environments do not possess, and then have the advantages of strong nuclear families attacked as unfair discrimination be seen as “systemically” unfair? Similarly, should we not seek to be “self-reliant” and in charge of our lives to the highest extent of our capability?
If neither family structures nor self reliance are to be preferred ideals, what replaces them? From where do these presumably “better” replacement values come, and is the proper approach in abandoning the “White” values a search for the opposite? Should we, for example, adopt the value of being heavily reliant on others who are themselves attempting to avoid being “self” reliant? This creates the dilemma that, if you exchange self-reliance for “other reliance” have you not simply created another dependency relationship and, if so, why bother?
Similarly, if we are rejecting the concept of “being in charge of our lives”, just who or what is supposed to be in charge of our fate and well-being? Within this argument is the barely hidden possibility of being controlled by an authoritarian order whose controllers know “what is best” for us and compels us to comply with its dictates or suffer the consequences. For this we might look at Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, or Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as precautionary reminders about what happens when fanatical ideologues gain full control.
The challenge is in figuring out what are the “non-White” replacement values? Are we to be a “collective” or “hive”? Should we avoid planning for our future well-being, operate according to fully emotional factors rather than logic, or not worry about having evidence for our conclusions,? Similarly, should we give up on reason, logic and objectivity, or be hesitant or insecure in what we do and say—because we are being told that self-confidence is a “White value”? Nor should we ever be proud of what we have accomplished, because humility is a virtue and we should be ashamed for being proud of what we created and achieved.
The Montana Attorney General Indicates at Least Some of Compelled Critical Race Theory Violates the Constitution and US Civil Rights Laws
“Austin Knudsen, Republican attorney general of Montana, wrote a legal opinion about whether Marxist-invented critical race theory (CRT) violated the U.S. and Montana constitutions as well as various federal civil rights laws. … In his legal opinion, Knudsen wrote that in many instances the use of CRT and so-called antiracism programming does discriminate “on the basis of race, color, or national origin in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Article II, Section 4 of the Montana Constitution, and the Montana Human Rights Act.” … “The driving force behind CRT and antiracism is the complete and total acceptance of a specific worldview—one that encompasses very specific notions about history, philosophy, sociology, and public policy.
Being a so-called ‘antiracist’ requires individuals to accept these premises and advocate for specific policy proposals. “Individuals who do not comply cannot truly be ‘antiracist,’ and are, therefore, considered racist,” Knudsen wrote. “By its own terms, antiracism excludes individuals who merely advocate for the neutral legal principles of the Constitution, or who deny or question the extent to which white supremacy continues to shape our institutions,” he wrote. “To that end, no one can be antiracist who does not act to eliminate the vestiges of white supremacy, i.e., embrace the specific public policy proposals of CRT and antiracism.”
“For example, critics have suggested that there is one, and only one, correct stance on standardized testing, drug legalization, Medicare for All, and even the capital gains tax rate. This paradigm is conveniently constructed ‘like a mousetrap,’” Knudsen wrote. “Disagreement with any aspect becomes irrefutable evidence of its premises of systemic racism, bias, fragility, or white supremacy. … CRT and antiracism are not merely academic ideas confined to university critical studies courses. These ideologies have begun to infiltrate mainstream American dialogue and permeate our institutions.” https://www.theepochtimes.com/montana-attorney-general-provides-legal-basis-for-rejecting-critical-race-theory_3910709.html. “Montana Attorney General Provides Legal Basis for Rejecting Critical Race Theory: Activists”, Mathew Vadum, 7/20/21.