As the saying goes, “history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes”, especially when using the same hellish Marxism that always results in totalitarian repression.
If you're one of those people who gets off on the whole "history repeats" bromide, here's a little comparison of the Cultural Revolution with today's mobs. pic.twitter.com/JBe4QtVgcf
— Dave Vandenbout (@devbisme) August 26, 2020
The Critical Race Theory “Struggle Sessions” are being challenged from within by a brave soul who has likely thrown his entire career out the window with a “canceling” on its way.
There is a civil war erupting at @SandiaLabs.
Following my investigation, a dissident electrical engineer named Casey Peterson emailed all 16,000 employees denouncing critical race theory in the lab and hoping to spark a rebellion against Sandia executives.
Here's the story.🧵
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) August 27, 2020
On Tuesday, Peterson made a YouTube video "pushing back back on the narrative of modern systemic racism and white privilege."
The video quickly hit 10,000 views within the labs and dozens of Sandia employees contacted Peterson to express support.https://t.co/vMDH2vILB7
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) August 27, 2020
Of course intellectual diversity at one of the top scientific labs in the world wouldn’t be tolerated.
News of the Week for Aug. 29th, 2020
There are people with bonafide medical conditions such as Swyer’s Syndrome where the body develops along the lines of the opposite sex than the presence (or lack thereof) would otherwise have directed bodily development.
There are people who insist that “gender identity” is separate and distinct from biological sex, thus a biological male who identifies as a woman is “trans-gender” because said individuals gender identity is the opposite of that associated with their sex.
There are people who believe that “sex” is a spectrum, and that the presence or lack of a Y chromosome is irrelevant to whether one is a man or a woman.
Sadly, there are even people who believe that by becoming transgender, that biology will follow suite and that by means of modern day sympathetic magic will take on the appellation and superficial appearance of the other sex they will become the other sex. It is this last category which is truly sad because a sudden realization of reality can cause a mental break or even potentially suicide. In some cases, the delusion is so strong that biological reality is outright denies as being “transphobic”:
The “Struggle Sessions” of wokeness that we’ve seen forced upon city workers in Seattle and in Sandia National Lab are far more widespread than many would want to believe. Yet again, Christopher F. Rufo has uncovered more “anti-racism”, this time at Argonne National Lab.
The virus of critical race theory is spreading to all of the national laboratories.
In new documents from Argonne National Lab—which handles national security and supercomputing for the federal government—a whistleblower describes a relentless campaign of racial harassment.
🧵
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) August 20, 2020
One must wonder if the white deer that roam the grounds of Argonne will be forced to “check their privilege”?
#BlackLivesMatter is openly Marxist, but they are primarily channeling Lenin. The broader Left’s goal is to fundamentally transform America into something antithetical to itself. They don’t care exactly how it is done, so they probe everywhere until they find a soft spot, as Cameron Hilditch notes.
“[This] put[s] me in mind of an old quotation from Lenin that he used to describe the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary strategy.
“‘You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.’
“This has been the tactic of every revolutionary movement in modern history. Armed with the sharp end of their weapons (both physical and philosophical), they search for the soft underbelly of the existing order, the place at once most vulnerable and least likely to offer concerted resistance. When this point is discovered, Lenin instructs his followers to attack it with all their might.
“…
“The most reliable indicator for the success of any revolution is whether or not one can hear this question being asked among those in power: ‘Are we sure we’re on the right side of this?’ Once these words begin to make their way around the corridors of power, the writing is on the wall for the powers that be.
“…
“Black Lives Matter, it seems, have probed and found mush in the area of race relations. This is hardly surprising. If there is one issue on which Americans are likely to doubt the justice of their nation’s cause, it is the issue of race. It is hard for a country only 60-odd years removed from the civil-rights movement to have great confidence in the established order when that order is criticized for racial injustice. But the fact that this doubt manifests itself in a reluctance to stand four-square behind the rule of law is what cynical criminals such as those mentioned above prey upon. They firmly believe that this reluctance will allow them to get away with beating the living daylights out of a human being in the middle of an American city and then rummaging through his car to steal things . . . on camera.”
But why? Because we’ve lost the narrative. For far too many people they just took America and for what it stands stands for granted and thought that it was self-evidence because for them it was normal and presumed it always would be to others. Slavery was always anti-thetical to the underlying precepts and values that pre-date America and once endemic through-out the Anglosphere. It was a cancer that corrupted and poisoned America, but a cancer and poison that America ultimately triumphed over, though deep wounds remain. One of those wounds is racism, which arose as an attempt to justify slavery in a culture within which equality under the law and liberty was integral by claiming that the enslaved race was inferior. This, too, was antithetical to what America stands for, and something America is rejecting, despite the Critical Race Theorists attempt to have people see everything through the framework of race and the oppressor/oppressed dynamic.
But we’ve not been teaching this. And from this absence the alternative narrative of America being systemically racist that was build with the purpose of racial oppression (and other intersectional “systems of oppression”). We are now paying that price.
The beliefs of the far Left are becoming less mere academic flippancy and more concrete proposals to fundamentally transform America to the point of annihilation. If you want to defeat this assault on freedom under the law, then it is important to understand the philosophical underpinnings, and groan-worthy as they may be, and to not only treat it as the real threat it is, but also be able to undermine their undermining.
The core tenets of Marxism, both its fantasy as well as its presumptions and dishonest cribbing of others, are necessary to understand if we are to counter its already systemic influence and power. An article at Quillete by Yoram Hazony might start as a brief primer.
“We can describe Marx’s political framework as follows:
“1. Oppressor and oppressed
Marx argues that, as an empirical matter, people invariably form themselves into cohesive groups (he calls them classes), which exploit one another to the extent they are able. A liberal political order is no different in this from any other, and it tends toward two classes, one of which owns and controls pretty much everything (the oppressor); while the other is exploited, and the fruit of its labor appropriated, so that it does not advance and, in fact, remains forever enslaved (the oppressed). In addition, Marx sees the state itself, its laws and its mechanisms of enforcement, as a tool that the oppressor class uses to keep the regime of oppression in place and to assist in carrying out this work.
“2. False consciousness
Marx recognizes that the liberal businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals who keep this system in place are unaware that they are the oppressors, and that what they think of as progress has only established new conditions of oppression. Indeed, even the working class may not know that they are exploited and oppressed. This is because they all think in terms of liberal categories (e.g., the individual’s right to freely sell his labor) which obscure the systematic oppression that is taking place. This ignorance of the fact that one is an oppressor or oppressed is called the ruling ideology (Engels later coined the phrase false consciousness to describe it), and it is only overcome when one is awakened to what is happening and learns to recognize reality using true categories.
“3. Revolutionary reconstitution of society
Marx suggests that, historically, oppressed classes have materially improved their conditions only through a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large—that is, through the destruction of the oppressor class, and of the social norms and ideas that hold the regime of systematic oppression in place. He even specifies that liberals will supply the oppressed with the tools needed to overthrow them. There is a period of “more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution” and the “violent overthrow” of the liberal oppressors. At this point, the oppressed seize control of the state.
“4. Total disappearance of class antagonisms
Marx promises that after the oppressed underclass takes control of the state, the exploitation of individuals by other individuals will be “put to an end” and the antagonism between classes of individuals will totally disappear. How this is to be done is not specified.”
Mr. Hazony also discusses this topic via podcast.
Post-WWII, one of the things that the British could boast about was their brilliant comedy, that even the BBC could boast about while otherwise putting down the U.K.
So, what has British “humor”—in all it’s political correctness—degraded to?
This.
It's time for us to check out how those wacky and zany folks in terrestrial TV comedy have been gettin' on since we all stopped watching.
What d'ya think?pic.twitter.com/IbZZrJPyvB— Alf Garnett (@FunnyAlfGarnett) July 9, 2020
As the veritable Daniel Hannan notes, “Does anyone, even the wokiest of the woke, actually find this funny? My suspicion is that it triggers a kind of Pavlovian response: ‘Ooh, she said something about racists, I’d better guffaw’.”
With all the chaos and downsides of “living in interesting times”, from Impeachment and Corona-chan to the George Floyd riots cum revolutionary temper-tantrums, one rather important element of international conflict, abet a non-shooting one (so far), is the clash between the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the United States of America.
The Trump administration has authorized sanctions against the International Criminal Court.
“President Donald Trump on Thursday moved to further punish officials of the International Criminal Court, authorizing economic sanctions against them as well as the expansion of visa restrictions on the officials and their families.
“The president also declared a national emergency with respect to the “threat” he says the ICC poses, a move that lays legal groundwork to impose future sanctions.
“The efforts come amid Trump administration anger over the ICC’s efforts to look into alleged war crimes by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.”
Why?
“The ICC ‘is little more than a political tool employed by unaccountable international elites,’ [Attorney General Bill] Barr said at the news conference, where officials took no questions. He claimed the Justice Department had ‘received substantial credible information that raises serious concerns about a long history of financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels’ of the court, which the department is now investigating, he said.”
The United States is not subservient to the International Criminal Court and never ratified any treaty to that effect. The ICC has no power over the United States and the United States does not recognize the authority or legitimacy of the ICC. To put it bluntly, the International Criminal Court are akin to gangsters or pirates when it comes to American citizens. This is why the President of the United States is authorized to legally liberate any American from the clutches of the ICC (the law that authorizes that is also known as the “Hague Invasion Act”).
The beliefs of the far Left are becoming less mere academic flippancy and more concrete proposals to fundamentally transform America to the point of annihilation. If you want to defeat this assault on freedom under the law, then it is important to understand the philosophical underpinnings, and groan-worthy as they may be, and to not only treat it as the real threat it is, but also be able to undermine their undermining.
A discussion of this “philosophy of wokeness” was undertaken on the Federalist Radio Hour with Emily Jashinsky and Spencer Klavan.
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