October 1, 2024
Dear Friends and Family,
This is the last segment on the ideological change within the Democrat Party. We first looked at the change via the Biden-Sanders unity agreement in segment 1, Then Tulsi Gabbard provided insight on how the change caused her to leave the Party – Segment 11. Gerard Baker followed opining on how Americans have lost trust in our leadership and institutions, particularly in Democrats. Ted Cruz wrote about the infusion of Marxism throughout the country followed by Mark Levin’s contention that we are in the midst of an assault on our Constitutional Government in the form of a Democrat led Marxist movement that is gaining speed. Sage Thomas Sowell reported that the Progressive intellectual elites see themselves as key possessors of consequential knowledge and remain impervious to evidence contrary to their beliefs. In this segment Christopher Rufo states that the ultimate aim of the Progressive DEI initiative (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is to End Our Constitutional Order, and replace it with increased power given to Federal Bureaucrats. Heavy stuff. Lots to digest.
I don’t want to believe it! But the signs of Constitution disregard the last four years are there supporting it: Mandating DEI training throughout the Federal Government including the military. Defying the rule of law – open borders, student loan forgiveness, White House collusion with Big Tech to censor information, weaponization of government against political opponents. Threats to “Pack the Court,” do away with the “Electoral College,” and eliminate the filibuster rule in the Senate. Using Public Schools to indoctrinate students to Progressive ideology. War on the nuclear family and disregarding parental concerns. Heavy use of Executive Orders to bypass Congressional legislation. Vaccination mandates, even to extent of weaponizing OSHA against employers to do so.
The signs of continuance in the future are also there: Price controls; Rent controls; Taxation on unrealized capital gains (including our homes); wealth tax threats; more government controlled “gifts” & less tax relief. Net, more and more government control and redistribution of income and wealth. Supporting speculation is enhanced with less information from the Democrat candidates, more policy flip-flopping, no interviews or press conferences, no penetrating questions with fewer answers. It astounds me that there is no DEI discussion. It is all happening behind closed doors. The progressives are controlling the Party.
The DEI information in the attached excerpts is of the utmost importance to the future of our country. The following text provides the essence. If you are interested in the history of DEI and how it has progressed throughout our country, then read the attached PDF.
Happy Learning,
Harley
P.S. A Wall Street Journal editorial on Harris’ Economic play which just came out on September 26 can be found in the Commentary headline located on the first page of the blog.
Dear Friends and Family,
This is the last segment on the ideological change within the Democrat Party. We first looked at the change via the Biden-Sanders unity agreement in segment 1, Then Tulsi Gabbard provided insight on how the change caused her to leave the Party – Segment 11. Gerard Baker followed opining on how Americans have lost trust in our leadership and institutions, particularly in Democrats. Ted Cruz wrote about the infusion of Marxism throughout the country followed by Mark Levin’s contention that we are in the midst of an assault on our Constitutional Government in the form of a Democrat led Marxist movement that is gaining speed. Sage Thomas Sowell reported that the Progressive intellectual elites see themselves as key possessors of consequential knowledge and remain impervious to evidence contrary to their beliefs. In this segment Christopher Rufo states that the ultimate aim of the Progressive DEI initiative (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is to End Our Constitutional Order, and replace it with increased power given to Federal Bureaucrats. Heavy stuff. Lots to digest.
I don’t want to believe it! But the signs of Constitution disregard the last four years are there supporting it: Mandating DEI training throughout the Federal Government including the military. Defying the rule of law – open borders, student loan forgiveness, White House collusion with Big Tech to censor information, weaponization of government against political opponents. Threats to “Pack the Court,” do away with the “Electoral College,” and eliminate the filibuster rule in the Senate. Using Public Schools to indoctrinate students to Progressive ideology. War on the nuclear family and disregarding parental concerns. Heavy use of Executive Orders to bypass Congressional legislation. Vaccination mandates, even to extent of weaponizing OSHA against employers to do so.
The signs of continuance in the future are also there: Price controls; Rent controls; Taxation on unrealized capital gains (including our homes); wealth tax threats; more government controlled “gifts” & less tax relief. Net, more and more government control and redistribution of income and wealth. Supporting speculation is enhanced with less information from the Democrat candidates, more policy flip-flopping, no interviews or press conferences, no penetrating questions with fewer answers. It astounds me that there is no DEI discussion. It is all happening behind closed doors. The progressives are controlling the Party.
The DEI information in the attached excerpts is of the utmost importance to the future of our country. The following text provides the essence. If you are interested in the history of DEI and how it has progressed throughout our country, then read the attached PDF.
Happy Learning,
Harley
P.S. A Wall Street Journal editorial on Harris’ Economic play which just came out on September 26 can be found in the Commentary headline located on the first page of the blog.
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR COUNTRY – SEGMENT 16
THE END OF CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER? – EXCEPTS
INTRODUCTION: The critical theories of 1968 have turned into a substitute morality: racism is elevated into the highest principle; society is divided into a crude moral binary of “racist” and “anti-racist”; and a new bureaucratic logic is required to adjudicate, guide and redistribute wealth, power, and privilege. To enforce this new orthodoxy, left-wing activists have established departments of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” across an entire stratum of the public and private bureaucracies. Allies are rewarded with status, position, and employment. Dissenters are shamed, marginalized, and sent into moral exile. America’s cultural revolution has culminated in the emergence of a new ideological regime that is inspired by the critical theories administered through the capture of the bureaucracy. Although the official political structures have not changed – there is still a president, a legislature and a judiciary – the entire intellectual substructure has shifted. The institutions imposed a revolution from above, effectuating a wholesale moral reversal and implementing a new layer of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” across the entire society. Nobody voted for this change; it simply materialized from within.
The common citizen can sense that a new ideological regime has been established in the institutions that proved the structure for his social, political, and spiritual life. He understands intuitively that appeals to a new system of governance based on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are a pretense for establishing a political order that is hostile to his values, even if he does not yet possess the vocabulary to piece through the shell of euphemism and describe its essence. Although it may seem that America’s cultural revolution has entered a period of dominance, the space between its ambitions and its outcomes has left open the possibility of reversal. The simple fact is that society under critical theories does not work. The basic premise of the enemies of the cultural revolution must help the common citizen understand what is happening around him and mobilize the vast reservoir of public sentiment against the ideologies, laws, and institutions that seek to make the cultural revolution a permanent feature of American life.
This counter-revolution is already forming and staking out the territory for the fight ahead. The question is which vision will prevail and which vision will return into the void.
THE PROGRESSIVE LEFT’S IDEOLOGY: The progressives proposed a new theory of revolution; the “weapon of theory” to awaken the masses and build the political consciousness required for revolution. The general line was radical at the time, now reads as something quite familiar: the United States was founded on racism, sexism, slavery, and genocide; the ruling class then set about with “the institution of white supremacy,” which was “maintained and perpetuated over the generations by schools, the unemployment cycle, the drug trade, immigration laws, birth control, the army, the prisons”; and as a result the current system was full of rot, enriching the elites while oppressing racial minorities and appeasing poor whites with “white-skin privilege.”
The elements of critical race theory are, in fact, a near-perfect transposition of race onto the basic structures of Marxist theory. “White supremacy” replaces “capitalism” as the totalizing system. “White and black” replaces “bourgeoisie and proletariat” as the “oppressor and oppressed.” “Abolition” replaces “revolution” as the method of “liberation.” These beliefs were fundamental. Even after the collapse of global communism, the critical race theorists continued to believe that the essential thrust of Marxian theory, translated into praxis, was correct. Since the beginning, critical race theory was designed to be a weapon. The critical race theorists spent years building an ideology they believed could undermine the authority of the “white male voice” and disrupt the certainties of the “white academy.” To elevate the “victim perspective” over the “perpetrator perspective.” This functioned as a reversal: knowledge is reduced to power and provides the critical race theorists with a new basis for overturning the existing hierarchy. In practice, the victim becomes the new source of authority – and his subjective feelings must be validated.
Over time, this regime of “liberating tolerance” came to be known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI. Even the language was brilliant. From the beginning, it had the attributes of a moral bulldozer; to oppose “diversity” was bigotry, to oppose “inclusion” was racism; to oppose “equity” was domination. The move from critical theory to DEI was a stroke of genius. By combining the academic program of critical theories with the bureaucratic program of diversity training, left-wing activists discovered the formula for expanding their power over the university as a whole. Once their critical theory turned into the governing principle of the university – sanitized as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and concretized in the sprawling bureaucracy – it was only a matter of time before it sought to extend itself beyond the campus gates.
The state, it turned out, was an easy capture. The revolutionaries were able to easily translate the strategies, tactics, and policies of the universities to the state bureaucracy. There was hardly any resistance at all. The activists-bureaucrats had a simple list of objectives: capture the culture of the federal agencies, enforce political orthodoxy with critical theory-based DEI programs; turn the federal government into a patronage machine for left-wing activism. The first step has already been accomplished. The political culture of the federal agencies is almost indistinguishable from that of the universities.
The administration of President Joseph Biden has mandated “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in every department of the federal government and the largest agencies have phalanxes of “diversity officers” who administer the bureaucracy in accordance with left-wing ideology. In the mandatory training the sessions begin with the trainers explaining that their intention is to expose the “roots of white male culture,” which consists of “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work,” and “striving towards success” – which might be superficially appealing but are, in fact, rooted in “racism, sexism, and homophobia” and “devastating” to women and minorities. This culture, according to the program materials, imposes a “white male standard” on others and leads to “lowered quality of life at work and home, reduced life expectancy, unproductive relationships, and high stress.”
The federal bureaucracy, which was designed to be neutral, or at least accountable to the executive, is now a creature of its own prerogatives. The bureaucrats claim to pursue knowledge, but in truth pursue power, and under the justification of technical expertise. The state becomes the primary vehicle of revolution. It no longer seeks to serve the public but, following the dictates of critical theory, seeks to subvert itself. It is a revolt of the state against the people – and, to that end, it is rapidly gaining power.
DEI and the END of the CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER: Critical race theory was never designed to reveal truth –it was designed to achieve power. The theorists created a circular, self-reinforcing system that created its own demand and installed a new, universal class of “diversity officials” across the institutions, which seeks to break down the old protections of individual rights, colorblind equality, and private property and replace them with a substitute morality and system of government based on the principles of critical race theory. Their theory – that the Constitution upholds the regime of white supremacy and must be superseded by a regime of “racial equity” – has become dominant across the entire range of elite institutions. Their praxis has been astonishingly successful in advancing their ideology into power.
Over the past decade, the entire range of federal agencies, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has adopted critical race theory as an in-house ideology. In quick succession, these departments created new programming that condemned the United States as “systemically racist,” interrogated employees for their “whiteness,” and demanded loyalty to government by “anti-racism,” or, more accurately, government by the principles of critical race theory. The agencies told employees to abandon their historical commitment to neutrality and engage in explicit left-wing political activism. Even federal defense contractors have submitted to the new ideology.
At the practical level, it would mean permanently categorizing, ranking, sorting, rewarding, and punishing individuals on the basis of identity, rather than character, merit, or individual accomplishment. For the critical race theorists, the question was how, not if, racism had occurred and any alternate explanations for disparities, such as family culture, and behavior, were dismissed as rationalizations for white supremacy. The key justification for this policy came from UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris.
The solution for Harris was to replace the system of property rights and equal protection, with a system of positive discrimination tasked with “redistributing power and resources in order to rectify inequities and the achieve real equality.” To achieve this goal, she advocated large-scale land and wealth redistribution, inspired in part by the African decolonial model. As with private property and colorblind equality, the critical race theorists proposed that the First Amendment was not designed to protect individual speech, but the cynically enable “racist hate speech” and protect the system of white supremacy. Freedom of expression, they argued, does not serve citizens equally; in fact, it is both a means and a mask for subordination of minorities.
Taken together, the three pillars of the critical race theorists’ ideal system of governance – the replacement of individual rights with group rights, the race-based redistribution of wealth, the suppression of speech based on a racial and political calculus – constitute a change in political regime. Under the ideology, the meaning of the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment, and the protections of private property would be demolished. The result would be a form of tyranny: the state would not only control the distribution of material resources, as in a collectivist economic regime, but would also extend its domain over individual psychology, speech, expression, and behavior. These twin goals – material and nonmaterial reapportionment – would be achieved through the heavy hand of the state, which would be granted unprecedented intrusion into public private life.
On his first day in office, President Biden issued an executive order seeking to nationalize the approach of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “embed equity principles, polices, and approaches across the Federal Government.” In business, every Fortune 100 corporation in America has submitted to the ideology of DEI. This is only the beginning. This movement seeks to establish itself in every layer of the public and private administration, which will be refitted to advance the substitute morality or critical race theory and replace governance by the Constitution with governance by the bureaucracy. It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas. In other words, the scope and power of the new “Department of Anti-racism” would be nearly unlimited. In effect, it would become a fourth branch of government, unaccountable to voters, that would have the authority to veto, nullify, or suspend any law in any jurisdiction in the United States.
If critical race theory should succeed as a system of government, it is easy to imagine a future: an omnipotent bureaucracy that manages transfer payments between racial castes, enforces always-shifting speech and behavior codes through bureaucratic rule, and replaces the slogan of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” with the deadening euphemism of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” This is not yet the regime in America, but unless there is a reversal within the institutions, the slow, hulking machine of critical race ideology will continue to accumulate power and marginalize democratic opposition.
THE COUNTER REVOLUTION TO COME: Beneath the appearance of universal political rule, their cultural revolution has an immense vulnerability: the critical ideologies are a creature of the state, completely subsidized by the public through direct financing, university loan schemes, bureaucratic capture, and the civil right regulatory apparatus. These structures are taken for granted, but with sufficient will they can be reformed, redirected, or abolished through the democratic process. What the public giveth, but public can taketh away.
The bureaucracies of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” cannot improve conditions for the common citizen. The cultural revolution’s first vulnerability is philosophical. The members of this new elite might lambaste individualism, hard work, silent strength, and striving toward success as features of “white supremacy,” but they are unable to propose anything but platitudes in their place. There will be a reckoning. The simple fact is that the ideology of the elite has not demonstrated any capacity to solve the problems of the masses, even on its own terms.
When the left-wing activists control the moment of decision, it becomes clear that they do not have an agenda to transform their sweeping visions into a stable reality. Instead, chaos becomes the highest value. The ultimate tragedy of the critical theories is that as a governing ideology, they would trap the United States in an endless loop of failure, cynicism, and despair. The critical race theorists and their allies have turned resentment into a governing principle. But this is also a trap; resentment is a tool for obtaining power, not of wielding it successfully. As it undermines the institutions of family, faith, and community, it creates a void in the human heart that cannot be fill with its one-dimensional ideology.
The counter-revolution is a revolution for the return of natural rights, the Constitution, and the dignity of the individual. For this movement to be successful, the architects of the counter-revolution must develop a new political vocabulary with the power to break through the racialist and bureaucratic narratives, tap into the deep reservoir of popular sentiment that will provide the basis for mass support, and design a series of policies that will permanently sever the connection between the critical ideologies an administrative power.
If the endpoint of the critical theories is nihilism, the counter-revolution must begin with hope. The principles of the society under counter-revolution are not oriented toward sweeping reversals and absolutes, but toward the protection of the humble values and institutions of the common man: family, faith, work, community, country. The intellectuals and activist of the counter-revolution must warn the population with a competing set of values, spoken in language that exposes and surpasses the euphemisms of the left-wing ideological regime: excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos.
Source: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything by Christopher R. Rufo (2023)
BIG BROTHER IS TEACHING YOU by Gerard Baker
Mind your own damn business, Tim Walz says, belying the Democrats didactic attitude
Mind your own damn business. It’s a clever slogan, appealing to the most basic of human desires and American rights: the desire to be left alone and the right to be free from interference by an overbearing government.
Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Democratic vice-president nominee, has made it his catchphrase. During the weekend his wife, Gwen, repeated the line without the profanity but with added context for emphasis. Speaking at an Educators for Harris-Walz event in Virginia, Mrs. Walz, a former high-school English teacher took aim at JD Vance, Republican vice-presidential candidate, over a comment he made criticizing left-wing teachers who don’t have children of their own.
Mrs. Walz said, “Let me use my teacher voice: Mr. Vance, how about you mind your own business.” Her remarks were part of a campaign by Democrats to claim that pro-traditional family statements by Mr. Vance imply opposition to nontraditional means of reproduction, including fertility treatments such as those the Walzes used to create their family. There’s no evidence Mr. Vance opposes those treatments, and last week Donald Trump committed to compel insurance companies to cover in vitro fertilization.
It was the “teacher voice” remark that I found instructive. It unintentionally captured the Democratic idea of the polity they seek to lead and reshape. It spoke to how they view themselves – and us. They are the teachers, equipped with the knowledge and authority to direct their hapless charges. We are the students, naïve and ill-informed, sometimes attentive but too often insubordinate, with minds that need to be shaped and disciplined. The didactic ethic, in which our leaders treat us as people who can’t make good decisions for ourselves, has been vividly on display in the last decade.
We aren’t well-informed enough to understand the damage fossil fuel-energy production is doing to the environment. So, we need to be told what kind of car we can drive and what kind of stove we can cook on. We can’t be trusted with information from unreliable sources. Like schoolchildren reading naughty books and listening to schoolyard gossip, we must be protected from “misinformation.” We aren’t sufficiently developed to comprehend the dangers of firearms. So, our leaders must determine who can have access to them. We didn’t have their deep grasp of the science behind pandemics. So, we had to be instructed to stay home, wear masks and submit ourselves to vaccination on pain of losing our livelihoods. Lacking their sophisticate biological knowledge and understanding of geopolitics, we weren’t permitted to speculate about what cause Covid-19 either. We must accept the teacher’s word on the subject.
Not content with ensuring our compliance with their social studies and science curricula, our governor-didacts insist on teaching us ethics. We need to be educated in how sinful we are as white people, as Americans, guilty inheritors of Western civilization. We must learn the new catechism of critical theory and expiate our sin.
The lesson, as it were, of all this is that only lifelong government employees like Kamala Harris and Mr. Walz (and, once upon a time, President Biden) can guide and instruct the rest of us on how we live, to reprimand and reform us when we go wrong. Can we really look at what the Left has sought to do in the last few years and deny that another administration of the current ideological tenor would further limit our freedoms?
Partisan hyperbole is our modern scourge, so let’s not call them communists. We should recognize them for what they are – like all government bigwigs through history they think they know better. The inevitable upshot of that self-assurance is their right to take power away from the people.
So, let me use my “student voice” to ask the Harrises and Walzes of the world. How about you mind your own business for once?
Source: Wall Street Journal Article “Big Brother is Teaching You by Gerard Baker (September 2, 2024)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE END OF CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER? – EXCEPTS
INTRODUCTION: The critical theories of 1968 have turned into a substitute morality: racism is elevated into the highest principle; society is divided into a crude moral binary of “racist” and “anti-racist”; and a new bureaucratic logic is required to adjudicate, guide and redistribute wealth, power, and privilege. To enforce this new orthodoxy, left-wing activists have established departments of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” across an entire stratum of the public and private bureaucracies. Allies are rewarded with status, position, and employment. Dissenters are shamed, marginalized, and sent into moral exile. America’s cultural revolution has culminated in the emergence of a new ideological regime that is inspired by the critical theories administered through the capture of the bureaucracy. Although the official political structures have not changed – there is still a president, a legislature and a judiciary – the entire intellectual substructure has shifted. The institutions imposed a revolution from above, effectuating a wholesale moral reversal and implementing a new layer of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” across the entire society. Nobody voted for this change; it simply materialized from within.
The common citizen can sense that a new ideological regime has been established in the institutions that proved the structure for his social, political, and spiritual life. He understands intuitively that appeals to a new system of governance based on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are a pretense for establishing a political order that is hostile to his values, even if he does not yet possess the vocabulary to piece through the shell of euphemism and describe its essence. Although it may seem that America’s cultural revolution has entered a period of dominance, the space between its ambitions and its outcomes has left open the possibility of reversal. The simple fact is that society under critical theories does not work. The basic premise of the enemies of the cultural revolution must help the common citizen understand what is happening around him and mobilize the vast reservoir of public sentiment against the ideologies, laws, and institutions that seek to make the cultural revolution a permanent feature of American life.
This counter-revolution is already forming and staking out the territory for the fight ahead. The question is which vision will prevail and which vision will return into the void.
THE PROGRESSIVE LEFT’S IDEOLOGY: The progressives proposed a new theory of revolution; the “weapon of theory” to awaken the masses and build the political consciousness required for revolution. The general line was radical at the time, now reads as something quite familiar: the United States was founded on racism, sexism, slavery, and genocide; the ruling class then set about with “the institution of white supremacy,” which was “maintained and perpetuated over the generations by schools, the unemployment cycle, the drug trade, immigration laws, birth control, the army, the prisons”; and as a result the current system was full of rot, enriching the elites while oppressing racial minorities and appeasing poor whites with “white-skin privilege.”
The elements of critical race theory are, in fact, a near-perfect transposition of race onto the basic structures of Marxist theory. “White supremacy” replaces “capitalism” as the totalizing system. “White and black” replaces “bourgeoisie and proletariat” as the “oppressor and oppressed.” “Abolition” replaces “revolution” as the method of “liberation.” These beliefs were fundamental. Even after the collapse of global communism, the critical race theorists continued to believe that the essential thrust of Marxian theory, translated into praxis, was correct. Since the beginning, critical race theory was designed to be a weapon. The critical race theorists spent years building an ideology they believed could undermine the authority of the “white male voice” and disrupt the certainties of the “white academy.” To elevate the “victim perspective” over the “perpetrator perspective.” This functioned as a reversal: knowledge is reduced to power and provides the critical race theorists with a new basis for overturning the existing hierarchy. In practice, the victim becomes the new source of authority – and his subjective feelings must be validated.
Over time, this regime of “liberating tolerance” came to be known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI. Even the language was brilliant. From the beginning, it had the attributes of a moral bulldozer; to oppose “diversity” was bigotry, to oppose “inclusion” was racism; to oppose “equity” was domination. The move from critical theory to DEI was a stroke of genius. By combining the academic program of critical theories with the bureaucratic program of diversity training, left-wing activists discovered the formula for expanding their power over the university as a whole. Once their critical theory turned into the governing principle of the university – sanitized as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and concretized in the sprawling bureaucracy – it was only a matter of time before it sought to extend itself beyond the campus gates.
The state, it turned out, was an easy capture. The revolutionaries were able to easily translate the strategies, tactics, and policies of the universities to the state bureaucracy. There was hardly any resistance at all. The activists-bureaucrats had a simple list of objectives: capture the culture of the federal agencies, enforce political orthodoxy with critical theory-based DEI programs; turn the federal government into a patronage machine for left-wing activism. The first step has already been accomplished. The political culture of the federal agencies is almost indistinguishable from that of the universities.
The administration of President Joseph Biden has mandated “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in every department of the federal government and the largest agencies have phalanxes of “diversity officers” who administer the bureaucracy in accordance with left-wing ideology. In the mandatory training the sessions begin with the trainers explaining that their intention is to expose the “roots of white male culture,” which consists of “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work,” and “striving towards success” – which might be superficially appealing but are, in fact, rooted in “racism, sexism, and homophobia” and “devastating” to women and minorities. This culture, according to the program materials, imposes a “white male standard” on others and leads to “lowered quality of life at work and home, reduced life expectancy, unproductive relationships, and high stress.”
The federal bureaucracy, which was designed to be neutral, or at least accountable to the executive, is now a creature of its own prerogatives. The bureaucrats claim to pursue knowledge, but in truth pursue power, and under the justification of technical expertise. The state becomes the primary vehicle of revolution. It no longer seeks to serve the public but, following the dictates of critical theory, seeks to subvert itself. It is a revolt of the state against the people – and, to that end, it is rapidly gaining power.
DEI and the END of the CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER: Critical race theory was never designed to reveal truth –it was designed to achieve power. The theorists created a circular, self-reinforcing system that created its own demand and installed a new, universal class of “diversity officials” across the institutions, which seeks to break down the old protections of individual rights, colorblind equality, and private property and replace them with a substitute morality and system of government based on the principles of critical race theory. Their theory – that the Constitution upholds the regime of white supremacy and must be superseded by a regime of “racial equity” – has become dominant across the entire range of elite institutions. Their praxis has been astonishingly successful in advancing their ideology into power.
Over the past decade, the entire range of federal agencies, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has adopted critical race theory as an in-house ideology. In quick succession, these departments created new programming that condemned the United States as “systemically racist,” interrogated employees for their “whiteness,” and demanded loyalty to government by “anti-racism,” or, more accurately, government by the principles of critical race theory. The agencies told employees to abandon their historical commitment to neutrality and engage in explicit left-wing political activism. Even federal defense contractors have submitted to the new ideology.
At the practical level, it would mean permanently categorizing, ranking, sorting, rewarding, and punishing individuals on the basis of identity, rather than character, merit, or individual accomplishment. For the critical race theorists, the question was how, not if, racism had occurred and any alternate explanations for disparities, such as family culture, and behavior, were dismissed as rationalizations for white supremacy. The key justification for this policy came from UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris.
The solution for Harris was to replace the system of property rights and equal protection, with a system of positive discrimination tasked with “redistributing power and resources in order to rectify inequities and the achieve real equality.” To achieve this goal, she advocated large-scale land and wealth redistribution, inspired in part by the African decolonial model. As with private property and colorblind equality, the critical race theorists proposed that the First Amendment was not designed to protect individual speech, but the cynically enable “racist hate speech” and protect the system of white supremacy. Freedom of expression, they argued, does not serve citizens equally; in fact, it is both a means and a mask for subordination of minorities.
Taken together, the three pillars of the critical race theorists’ ideal system of governance – the replacement of individual rights with group rights, the race-based redistribution of wealth, the suppression of speech based on a racial and political calculus – constitute a change in political regime. Under the ideology, the meaning of the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment, and the protections of private property would be demolished. The result would be a form of tyranny: the state would not only control the distribution of material resources, as in a collectivist economic regime, but would also extend its domain over individual psychology, speech, expression, and behavior. These twin goals – material and nonmaterial reapportionment – would be achieved through the heavy hand of the state, which would be granted unprecedented intrusion into public private life.
On his first day in office, President Biden issued an executive order seeking to nationalize the approach of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “embed equity principles, polices, and approaches across the Federal Government.” In business, every Fortune 100 corporation in America has submitted to the ideology of DEI. This is only the beginning. This movement seeks to establish itself in every layer of the public and private administration, which will be refitted to advance the substitute morality or critical race theory and replace governance by the Constitution with governance by the bureaucracy. It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas. In other words, the scope and power of the new “Department of Anti-racism” would be nearly unlimited. In effect, it would become a fourth branch of government, unaccountable to voters, that would have the authority to veto, nullify, or suspend any law in any jurisdiction in the United States.
If critical race theory should succeed as a system of government, it is easy to imagine a future: an omnipotent bureaucracy that manages transfer payments between racial castes, enforces always-shifting speech and behavior codes through bureaucratic rule, and replaces the slogan of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” with the deadening euphemism of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” This is not yet the regime in America, but unless there is a reversal within the institutions, the slow, hulking machine of critical race ideology will continue to accumulate power and marginalize democratic opposition.
THE COUNTER REVOLUTION TO COME: Beneath the appearance of universal political rule, their cultural revolution has an immense vulnerability: the critical ideologies are a creature of the state, completely subsidized by the public through direct financing, university loan schemes, bureaucratic capture, and the civil right regulatory apparatus. These structures are taken for granted, but with sufficient will they can be reformed, redirected, or abolished through the democratic process. What the public giveth, but public can taketh away.
The bureaucracies of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” cannot improve conditions for the common citizen. The cultural revolution’s first vulnerability is philosophical. The members of this new elite might lambaste individualism, hard work, silent strength, and striving toward success as features of “white supremacy,” but they are unable to propose anything but platitudes in their place. There will be a reckoning. The simple fact is that the ideology of the elite has not demonstrated any capacity to solve the problems of the masses, even on its own terms.
When the left-wing activists control the moment of decision, it becomes clear that they do not have an agenda to transform their sweeping visions into a stable reality. Instead, chaos becomes the highest value. The ultimate tragedy of the critical theories is that as a governing ideology, they would trap the United States in an endless loop of failure, cynicism, and despair. The critical race theorists and their allies have turned resentment into a governing principle. But this is also a trap; resentment is a tool for obtaining power, not of wielding it successfully. As it undermines the institutions of family, faith, and community, it creates a void in the human heart that cannot be fill with its one-dimensional ideology.
The counter-revolution is a revolution for the return of natural rights, the Constitution, and the dignity of the individual. For this movement to be successful, the architects of the counter-revolution must develop a new political vocabulary with the power to break through the racialist and bureaucratic narratives, tap into the deep reservoir of popular sentiment that will provide the basis for mass support, and design a series of policies that will permanently sever the connection between the critical ideologies an administrative power.
If the endpoint of the critical theories is nihilism, the counter-revolution must begin with hope. The principles of the society under counter-revolution are not oriented toward sweeping reversals and absolutes, but toward the protection of the humble values and institutions of the common man: family, faith, work, community, country. The intellectuals and activist of the counter-revolution must warn the population with a competing set of values, spoken in language that exposes and surpasses the euphemisms of the left-wing ideological regime: excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos.
Source: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything by Christopher R. Rufo (2023)
BIG BROTHER IS TEACHING YOU by Gerard Baker
Mind your own damn business, Tim Walz says, belying the Democrats didactic attitude
Mind your own damn business. It’s a clever slogan, appealing to the most basic of human desires and American rights: the desire to be left alone and the right to be free from interference by an overbearing government.
Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Democratic vice-president nominee, has made it his catchphrase. During the weekend his wife, Gwen, repeated the line without the profanity but with added context for emphasis. Speaking at an Educators for Harris-Walz event in Virginia, Mrs. Walz, a former high-school English teacher took aim at JD Vance, Republican vice-presidential candidate, over a comment he made criticizing left-wing teachers who don’t have children of their own.
Mrs. Walz said, “Let me use my teacher voice: Mr. Vance, how about you mind your own business.” Her remarks were part of a campaign by Democrats to claim that pro-traditional family statements by Mr. Vance imply opposition to nontraditional means of reproduction, including fertility treatments such as those the Walzes used to create their family. There’s no evidence Mr. Vance opposes those treatments, and last week Donald Trump committed to compel insurance companies to cover in vitro fertilization.
It was the “teacher voice” remark that I found instructive. It unintentionally captured the Democratic idea of the polity they seek to lead and reshape. It spoke to how they view themselves – and us. They are the teachers, equipped with the knowledge and authority to direct their hapless charges. We are the students, naïve and ill-informed, sometimes attentive but too often insubordinate, with minds that need to be shaped and disciplined. The didactic ethic, in which our leaders treat us as people who can’t make good decisions for ourselves, has been vividly on display in the last decade.
We aren’t well-informed enough to understand the damage fossil fuel-energy production is doing to the environment. So, we need to be told what kind of car we can drive and what kind of stove we can cook on. We can’t be trusted with information from unreliable sources. Like schoolchildren reading naughty books and listening to schoolyard gossip, we must be protected from “misinformation.” We aren’t sufficiently developed to comprehend the dangers of firearms. So, our leaders must determine who can have access to them. We didn’t have their deep grasp of the science behind pandemics. So, we had to be instructed to stay home, wear masks and submit ourselves to vaccination on pain of losing our livelihoods. Lacking their sophisticate biological knowledge and understanding of geopolitics, we weren’t permitted to speculate about what cause Covid-19 either. We must accept the teacher’s word on the subject.
Not content with ensuring our compliance with their social studies and science curricula, our governor-didacts insist on teaching us ethics. We need to be educated in how sinful we are as white people, as Americans, guilty inheritors of Western civilization. We must learn the new catechism of critical theory and expiate our sin.
The lesson, as it were, of all this is that only lifelong government employees like Kamala Harris and Mr. Walz (and, once upon a time, President Biden) can guide and instruct the rest of us on how we live, to reprimand and reform us when we go wrong. Can we really look at what the Left has sought to do in the last few years and deny that another administration of the current ideological tenor would further limit our freedoms?
Partisan hyperbole is our modern scourge, so let’s not call them communists. We should recognize them for what they are – like all government bigwigs through history they think they know better. The inevitable upshot of that self-assurance is their right to take power away from the people.
So, let me use my “student voice” to ask the Harrises and Walzes of the world. How about you mind your own business for once?
Source: Wall Street Journal Article “Big Brother is Teaching You by Gerard Baker (September 2, 2024)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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