April 26, 2022
Dear Friends and Family
The original Nihilism series ended in July 2021 with a postscript of excerpts from Mark Levin’s book American Marxism. In it, Levin posits that the Woke movement is based on Marxist ideology and in order to institute America’s version of Marxism they first have to rid the country of its values and systems. I term this as Nihilism which is defined as “a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and their existence is senseless and useless.”
I am choosing to start the epilogues on the Nihilism series with a list of questions raised in the December 30, 2021, issue of the Jewish World Review.
There will be four epilogues in this series. The first in titled American Values and Wokeness which builds on the above questions and statements.
Next: Epilogue 2 titles Woke Perspective of 24 Black Americans is a series of essays contending that “Wokeness” defames our national heritage, divides our people, and instills helplessness by victimizing many people of color and other members of minority segregated groups. The essays are published in a book titled Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family
The original Nihilism series ended in July 2021 with a postscript of excerpts from Mark Levin’s book American Marxism. In it, Levin posits that the Woke movement is based on Marxist ideology and in order to institute America’s version of Marxism they first have to rid the country of its values and systems. I term this as Nihilism which is defined as “a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and their existence is senseless and useless.”
I am choosing to start the epilogues on the Nihilism series with a list of questions raised in the December 30, 2021, issue of the Jewish World Review.
- If America is so flawed and irredeemable, why in fiscal 2021 are nearly two million foreigners now crashing our borders – illegally, en masse, and intent on reaching a supposedly racist nation that is purportedly inferior to those they abandon?
- Is it actually moral to discard the “content of our character” and “equal opportunity” principles of the prior Civil Rights movement of 60 years ago? Are their replacement fixations on the “color of our skin” and equality of result” superior?
- Do we ever pause to consider that we enjoy our modern standard of living because we were once a meritocracy that quit judging our workforce by tribal affinities and ancient prejudices?
- Are we proud that most standardized tests of student knowledge and achievement continue to decline, despite record investments in education?
- Would America have won World War II with the current labor participation rate of only six in ten Americans working?
- Racial fixations tend predictably in one direction. In good Confederate fashion, we lump all individuals who look alike into inexact collectives of “white,” “black,” and “brown” – often to stereotype the supposed evils of so-called white supremacy.
- Never in history has such a mediocre, but self-important and ungracious generation owed so much, and yet expressed so little gratitude, to its now dead forebearers.
There will be four epilogues in this series. The first in titled American Values and Wokeness which builds on the above questions and statements.
Next: Epilogue 2 titles Woke Perspective of 24 Black Americans is a series of essays contending that “Wokeness” defames our national heritage, divides our people, and instills helplessness by victimizing many people of color and other members of minority segregated groups. The essays are published in a book titled Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM EPILOGUES – EPILOGUE 1
AMERICAN VALUES AND WOKENESS – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All the excerpts in this segment are from Beyond Biden by Newt Gingrich (2021)
INTRODUCTION: Beyond Biden is an effort to describe the kind of America that is possible if we embrace the values and systems favored by the majority of the America people.
WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE: Georgia in 1960 was a one-party state. It was controlled by segregationist Democrats quite willing to use the force of government to sustain segregation and crush those who advocated integration. Segregationist Democrats maintained their position of dominating African Americans by a combination of force (both government and private), demagoguery, and direct personal intimidation – losing your job, having your family threatened, and being cut off economically and politically. Using vicious language, describing people in nasty terms, and being prepared to imprison, beat up, and in some cases kill opponents of segregations was seen as the unpleasant but unavoidable cost of keeping the white community dominant and the Black community subservient.
All of the technique’s segregationist Democrats were using in the early 1960s have now evolved into the techniques the new racist woke Democrats are using today. Consider the astonishing parallels. Segregationist mobs used violence to intimidate opponents of the system. Today woke mobs, advocates for Black Lives Matter, and Antifa, use violence to impose their agenda – this includes burning of buildings, looting stores, and physically attacking people. Segregationist legislatures and school boards fired teachers who broke ranks and advocated the end of segregation. Today it is the colleges, universities, and teachers’ unions who provide the policing that guarantees little or no dissent in the classroom against the tenets of the woke order. Those who don’t understand the new orthodoxy are driven from their careers. The weirdest things can be advocated by those on the left with little or no negative consequences. Yet, any questioning of the woke orthodoxy can lead to ostracism, firing, and lawsuits.
A BETTER FUTURE: We are on the edge of a series of scientific and technological revolutions that will make our lives dramatically more enjoyable. The wave of change is accelerating not shrinking. Breakthroughs in science and organization will improve health to an almost unbelievable degree.
Rejecting race-based politics and policies will return America to an integrated future in which every American has an opportunity to pursue happiness. (By 81% to 5% Americans agree with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his children “will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”) Americans will consolidate around the desire for a successful American society rather than a collection of racially defined tribes. The impact of this consolidation of values will be amazing.
Schools will return to focusing on merit, earned grades, and achievement. Critical Race Theory will be recognized as racist and destructive and will be outlawed in virtually every school district. Left-wing “woke” colleges and universities will come under enormous pressure to return teaching classic American history and values. The collapse of effective education, and the greed and selfish interests of teachers’ unions will lead to massive support for school choice in K-12 education followed by a dramatic improvement in learning outcomes.
Getting money from the government will be tied to a work requirement (as we did with welfare reform in 1996). The goal of welfare programs will be to get people out of the system rather than into the system. Connecting work to getting government money will lead to radical reductions in homelessness and dependence on government.
To get to the election system that is best for Americans and our system of government (in that order), we need to establish a simple, accepted goal: every American citizen who is eligible to vote should be able to do so securely and easily and have his or her voted counted – exactly once. Every election rule we make must be in pursuit of this goal and no other.
We need to overcome the influence and power that social media companies and other Big Tech engines are beginning to impose upon our society. It seems clear to me that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is no longer necessary.
Within thirty years, Americans and their allies will routinely be manufacturing in space and colonizing the moon and Mars. The first steps will have been taken to mining asteroids. Space tourism will have become a significant business both in the near-earth brief experiences and in traveling to a space station or to the moon or Mars. The space industry by 2050 will be a multi-trillion-dollar business.
UNDERSTANDING AND DEFEATING WOKENESS: Being “woke” is a new term, but it is an old idea. Karl Marx, the father of communism, and his Marxist disciples wrote about achieving “class consciousness” – a state of being in which a person finally understands that the working class are oppressed by the owners of production and property and commits themselves to revolution to overthrow their bosses. Marxists believe that when enough people have achieved class consciousness, revolution can happen that will eventually lead the way to a communist utopia. In other words, until you recognize your oppression (or your role in oppressing others) and commit to revolution, you are asleep. Or woke. The only meaningful difference between the radical left’s class consciousness of a hundred years ago and the radical left’s wokeness of today is how they are choosing to divide people. Before it was economic status. Now it is by fixed identity traits, such as race, gender, and sexuality.
The Truth Doesn’t Matter: Let me be as blunt as possible: critical theory is a dangerous, cynical lie. Arriving at the truth is explicitly not the point of critical theory. The point is revolution. Wokeism is at odds with the basic values and tenets of liberal democracy – a rejection of the enlightenment principles that inspired the American Revolution, our system of government, classical liberalism, and the spread of freedom and free markets throughout the globe. The goal of critical theory is to deconstruct our understanding of reality into a narrative of oppressor and oppressed to further the revolution.
Cancel Culture vs. Free Speech: Freedom of speech is not just a legal protection from government censorship; it is also a value. A society that values freedom of speech encourages the free and respectful exchange of ideas.
Cancel culture is a violation of this ethos. It suppresses any speech that is not politically correct as a brute exercise of power. The woke believe they can get away with this for a simple reason: they really do not believe in universal human rights, including freedom of speech -- individuals do not have rights, groups do. And the government is responsible for granting them, not protecting them. The woke don’t care about truth, only about the advancement of their narrative.
The Oppression Olympics: Critical theory teaches the woke that there is a hierarchy of oppression in the world. At the top sit straight, white, “cisgender” (meaning their biological sex aligns with what gender they feel they are), Christian men. They have the most of what the woke call “privilege,” and because of that, their opinions should be dismissed – unless, of course, they are apologizing for being born and parroting woke ideology, in which case they are being an “ally.” At the bottom of the ladder of oppression sit gay, transgender, disabled, black, female, refugee Druids. The more allegedly oppressed subgroups you identify with, the more your voice matters when it comes to issues of social justice. Unless, of course, you have an opinion heretical to woke ideology. Then it doesn’t matter how many allegedly oppressed identity characteristics you possess. Anyone who expresses opinions that do not fit into the woke narrative is declared to have an inauthentic voice or having internalized oppression/racism – in other words, a false consciousness. Again, this is straight out of Marxism.
Redefining Racism: Our common understanding of racism is actions, both individual and collective (such as laws), that treat members of one racial group differently than another. The woke don’t want to end discrimination; they want to discriminate based on their value system. That’s why its leaders have started talking about “institutional” or “systemic racism.” As the woke movement defines it, systemic racism is something broader than the unequal treatment of people of a certain race. The woke believe racism pervades all of society, affects all our institutions and policies, and manifests itself in every single interaction we have as a people. As a result of this mindset, the woke see racism everywhere and feel compelled to “call it out” so it can be dismantled. The woke left are seeking to delegitimize everything in our culture that we value as part of an invisible web of oppression designed to subjugate people of color for the benefit of whites.
Black Lives Matter stated that one of its objectives was to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another. There is no more important foundational institution in our society than that of the family. It is where we adopt most of our values and learn most of our assumptions about the world. The woke left would rather we get those values from their university professors, K-12 curriculum, and certified diversity trainers. That’s why the woke left want to delegitimize the family – so we are more willing to throw away the values passed on through generations in favor a radical new experiment.
Selective Racism: The idea of “whiteness” is a key concept for the woke and they want white people to become hyperaware of their racial identity. The woke define whiteness in purely negative terms and then force white people to identify with that negativity. This is cultlike behavior, targeting people’s self-esteem and sense of personal identity as the first step of brainwashing. And the woke are targeting your children as their next recruits.
The Woke War on Merit: The civil rights movement of the 1960s succeeded because it appealed to the traditional American framework. It called on America to live up to its founding ideals by ending discriminatory laws and allowing Black Americans to be full a part of American society.
This is not what wokeness is trying to do. Wokeness claims that American ideals are a lie. They are saying we need to abandon our common framework, because to insist that there is a normative American set of values only serves to further white supremacy.
Meanwhile, some anti-racist educators argue that requiring students to demonstrate subject matter expertise to get an A is racist because the idea of what a student should and should not know is a social construct. In this framework, a bad grade is evidence of a teacher’s inability due to racism to recognize a student’s knowledge rather than evidence of a student not having mastery of the course work. This is the sort of lame excuse a wisecracking student might make for why he failed a test. It is alarming to see it embraced by supposed educators.
Equity over Equality: According to the woke, it is impossible to not be racist since racism is baked into everything. More important, the woke believe that treating everyone equally is a tactic used by those in power to retain their power.
Anti-racists must commit themselves to dismantling institutional racism to achieve what the call racial equity. Equity is quite distinct then equality and is best understood as treating individuals unequally based on their race to achieve equal racial group outcomes. Equity is about treating individuals differently based on their group identity to achieve equal group outcomes. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order on advancing racial equity in the federal government. So, when politicians use the word “equity” they are explicitly endorsing race-based government policies that actively discriminate.
THE MORAL CASE AGAINST WOKEISM: At its core, wokeness is incompatible with the pursuit of civil rights and equality under the law – and with the way we treat our fellow citizens. This ideology must be understood, exposed and defeated if America is to survive as a bastion of freedom and prosperity – and if progress is going to continue to be made in allowing Americans of all backgrounds the opportunity to achieve the American dream.
The only way we can stop wokeism is by showing that it is immoral. And it is.
GOVERNANCE BY WOKE: In America there has always been a general belief that people could escape poverty through hard work and determination. Thus, the American concept of equality was grounded in individual rights, not the rights of a group. Today’s Democrats are explicitly combating the notion that one can break out of poverty by hard work.
The catch-22 of left-wing governance is that focusing on group rights instead of individual ones – and imposing an equality of ends rather than equality under the law – requires a privileged ruling class running a powerful central government to impose sameness on everyone. The quest for perfect, forced equality always leads to deep inequality and tyranny. The danger is compounded when the powerful ruling class rejects traditional morality and takes license to do anything to achieve its goals.
Source: Beyond Biden by Newt Gingrich (2021).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
AMERICAN VALUES AND WOKENESS – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All the excerpts in this segment are from Beyond Biden by Newt Gingrich (2021)
INTRODUCTION: Beyond Biden is an effort to describe the kind of America that is possible if we embrace the values and systems favored by the majority of the America people.
WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE: Georgia in 1960 was a one-party state. It was controlled by segregationist Democrats quite willing to use the force of government to sustain segregation and crush those who advocated integration. Segregationist Democrats maintained their position of dominating African Americans by a combination of force (both government and private), demagoguery, and direct personal intimidation – losing your job, having your family threatened, and being cut off economically and politically. Using vicious language, describing people in nasty terms, and being prepared to imprison, beat up, and in some cases kill opponents of segregations was seen as the unpleasant but unavoidable cost of keeping the white community dominant and the Black community subservient.
All of the technique’s segregationist Democrats were using in the early 1960s have now evolved into the techniques the new racist woke Democrats are using today. Consider the astonishing parallels. Segregationist mobs used violence to intimidate opponents of the system. Today woke mobs, advocates for Black Lives Matter, and Antifa, use violence to impose their agenda – this includes burning of buildings, looting stores, and physically attacking people. Segregationist legislatures and school boards fired teachers who broke ranks and advocated the end of segregation. Today it is the colleges, universities, and teachers’ unions who provide the policing that guarantees little or no dissent in the classroom against the tenets of the woke order. Those who don’t understand the new orthodoxy are driven from their careers. The weirdest things can be advocated by those on the left with little or no negative consequences. Yet, any questioning of the woke orthodoxy can lead to ostracism, firing, and lawsuits.
A BETTER FUTURE: We are on the edge of a series of scientific and technological revolutions that will make our lives dramatically more enjoyable. The wave of change is accelerating not shrinking. Breakthroughs in science and organization will improve health to an almost unbelievable degree.
Rejecting race-based politics and policies will return America to an integrated future in which every American has an opportunity to pursue happiness. (By 81% to 5% Americans agree with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his children “will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”) Americans will consolidate around the desire for a successful American society rather than a collection of racially defined tribes. The impact of this consolidation of values will be amazing.
Schools will return to focusing on merit, earned grades, and achievement. Critical Race Theory will be recognized as racist and destructive and will be outlawed in virtually every school district. Left-wing “woke” colleges and universities will come under enormous pressure to return teaching classic American history and values. The collapse of effective education, and the greed and selfish interests of teachers’ unions will lead to massive support for school choice in K-12 education followed by a dramatic improvement in learning outcomes.
Getting money from the government will be tied to a work requirement (as we did with welfare reform in 1996). The goal of welfare programs will be to get people out of the system rather than into the system. Connecting work to getting government money will lead to radical reductions in homelessness and dependence on government.
To get to the election system that is best for Americans and our system of government (in that order), we need to establish a simple, accepted goal: every American citizen who is eligible to vote should be able to do so securely and easily and have his or her voted counted – exactly once. Every election rule we make must be in pursuit of this goal and no other.
We need to overcome the influence and power that social media companies and other Big Tech engines are beginning to impose upon our society. It seems clear to me that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is no longer necessary.
Within thirty years, Americans and their allies will routinely be manufacturing in space and colonizing the moon and Mars. The first steps will have been taken to mining asteroids. Space tourism will have become a significant business both in the near-earth brief experiences and in traveling to a space station or to the moon or Mars. The space industry by 2050 will be a multi-trillion-dollar business.
UNDERSTANDING AND DEFEATING WOKENESS: Being “woke” is a new term, but it is an old idea. Karl Marx, the father of communism, and his Marxist disciples wrote about achieving “class consciousness” – a state of being in which a person finally understands that the working class are oppressed by the owners of production and property and commits themselves to revolution to overthrow their bosses. Marxists believe that when enough people have achieved class consciousness, revolution can happen that will eventually lead the way to a communist utopia. In other words, until you recognize your oppression (or your role in oppressing others) and commit to revolution, you are asleep. Or woke. The only meaningful difference between the radical left’s class consciousness of a hundred years ago and the radical left’s wokeness of today is how they are choosing to divide people. Before it was economic status. Now it is by fixed identity traits, such as race, gender, and sexuality.
The Truth Doesn’t Matter: Let me be as blunt as possible: critical theory is a dangerous, cynical lie. Arriving at the truth is explicitly not the point of critical theory. The point is revolution. Wokeism is at odds with the basic values and tenets of liberal democracy – a rejection of the enlightenment principles that inspired the American Revolution, our system of government, classical liberalism, and the spread of freedom and free markets throughout the globe. The goal of critical theory is to deconstruct our understanding of reality into a narrative of oppressor and oppressed to further the revolution.
Cancel Culture vs. Free Speech: Freedom of speech is not just a legal protection from government censorship; it is also a value. A society that values freedom of speech encourages the free and respectful exchange of ideas.
Cancel culture is a violation of this ethos. It suppresses any speech that is not politically correct as a brute exercise of power. The woke believe they can get away with this for a simple reason: they really do not believe in universal human rights, including freedom of speech -- individuals do not have rights, groups do. And the government is responsible for granting them, not protecting them. The woke don’t care about truth, only about the advancement of their narrative.
The Oppression Olympics: Critical theory teaches the woke that there is a hierarchy of oppression in the world. At the top sit straight, white, “cisgender” (meaning their biological sex aligns with what gender they feel they are), Christian men. They have the most of what the woke call “privilege,” and because of that, their opinions should be dismissed – unless, of course, they are apologizing for being born and parroting woke ideology, in which case they are being an “ally.” At the bottom of the ladder of oppression sit gay, transgender, disabled, black, female, refugee Druids. The more allegedly oppressed subgroups you identify with, the more your voice matters when it comes to issues of social justice. Unless, of course, you have an opinion heretical to woke ideology. Then it doesn’t matter how many allegedly oppressed identity characteristics you possess. Anyone who expresses opinions that do not fit into the woke narrative is declared to have an inauthentic voice or having internalized oppression/racism – in other words, a false consciousness. Again, this is straight out of Marxism.
Redefining Racism: Our common understanding of racism is actions, both individual and collective (such as laws), that treat members of one racial group differently than another. The woke don’t want to end discrimination; they want to discriminate based on their value system. That’s why its leaders have started talking about “institutional” or “systemic racism.” As the woke movement defines it, systemic racism is something broader than the unequal treatment of people of a certain race. The woke believe racism pervades all of society, affects all our institutions and policies, and manifests itself in every single interaction we have as a people. As a result of this mindset, the woke see racism everywhere and feel compelled to “call it out” so it can be dismantled. The woke left are seeking to delegitimize everything in our culture that we value as part of an invisible web of oppression designed to subjugate people of color for the benefit of whites.
Black Lives Matter stated that one of its objectives was to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another. There is no more important foundational institution in our society than that of the family. It is where we adopt most of our values and learn most of our assumptions about the world. The woke left would rather we get those values from their university professors, K-12 curriculum, and certified diversity trainers. That’s why the woke left want to delegitimize the family – so we are more willing to throw away the values passed on through generations in favor a radical new experiment.
Selective Racism: The idea of “whiteness” is a key concept for the woke and they want white people to become hyperaware of their racial identity. The woke define whiteness in purely negative terms and then force white people to identify with that negativity. This is cultlike behavior, targeting people’s self-esteem and sense of personal identity as the first step of brainwashing. And the woke are targeting your children as their next recruits.
The Woke War on Merit: The civil rights movement of the 1960s succeeded because it appealed to the traditional American framework. It called on America to live up to its founding ideals by ending discriminatory laws and allowing Black Americans to be full a part of American society.
This is not what wokeness is trying to do. Wokeness claims that American ideals are a lie. They are saying we need to abandon our common framework, because to insist that there is a normative American set of values only serves to further white supremacy.
Meanwhile, some anti-racist educators argue that requiring students to demonstrate subject matter expertise to get an A is racist because the idea of what a student should and should not know is a social construct. In this framework, a bad grade is evidence of a teacher’s inability due to racism to recognize a student’s knowledge rather than evidence of a student not having mastery of the course work. This is the sort of lame excuse a wisecracking student might make for why he failed a test. It is alarming to see it embraced by supposed educators.
Equity over Equality: According to the woke, it is impossible to not be racist since racism is baked into everything. More important, the woke believe that treating everyone equally is a tactic used by those in power to retain their power.
Anti-racists must commit themselves to dismantling institutional racism to achieve what the call racial equity. Equity is quite distinct then equality and is best understood as treating individuals unequally based on their race to achieve equal racial group outcomes. Equity is about treating individuals differently based on their group identity to achieve equal group outcomes. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order on advancing racial equity in the federal government. So, when politicians use the word “equity” they are explicitly endorsing race-based government policies that actively discriminate.
THE MORAL CASE AGAINST WOKEISM: At its core, wokeness is incompatible with the pursuit of civil rights and equality under the law – and with the way we treat our fellow citizens. This ideology must be understood, exposed and defeated if America is to survive as a bastion of freedom and prosperity – and if progress is going to continue to be made in allowing Americans of all backgrounds the opportunity to achieve the American dream.
The only way we can stop wokeism is by showing that it is immoral. And it is.
- Wokeism judges people by the color of their skin, not by the content of their character.
- Wokeism believes people today should be held responsible for what other people did in the past.
- Wokeism robs people of their individuality, forcing them into groups.
- Wokeism doesn’t believe in individual rights, only group rights.
- Wokeism rejects equal protection under the law in favor of discrimination based on skin color.
- Wokeism rejects basic freedom of speech in favor of censorship and fear of the mob.
- Wokeism rejects education in favor of indoctrination.
- Wokeism rejects the notion of truth.
- Wokeism doesn’t believe that hard work and merit should be rewarded.
- Wokeism divides us along racial and other lines rather than unifying us around a common American identity.
GOVERNANCE BY WOKE: In America there has always been a general belief that people could escape poverty through hard work and determination. Thus, the American concept of equality was grounded in individual rights, not the rights of a group. Today’s Democrats are explicitly combating the notion that one can break out of poverty by hard work.
The catch-22 of left-wing governance is that focusing on group rights instead of individual ones – and imposing an equality of ends rather than equality under the law – requires a privileged ruling class running a powerful central government to impose sameness on everyone. The quest for perfect, forced equality always leads to deep inequality and tyranny. The danger is compounded when the powerful ruling class rejects traditional morality and takes license to do anything to achieve its goals.
Source: Beyond Biden by Newt Gingrich (2021).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| nihl_e1l_values_and_wokeness.pdf |