A lot of words in the excellently written essay below by Mr. Gerard Baker of The Times, London. Thought out and written from a purely worldly viewpoint.
 
Know how to truly contend when confronted with the agenda below? By boldly, clearly, faithfully speaking the truth which is garnered, nurtured, and increased by spending time in and with the Word of God. Meditating prayerfully and faithfully. At the ready, prepared to give an accounting.
 
Because we’re all in this escalating spiritual war. And the enemy is strong. And fights dirty. Lies. Is a master of deception. Why they invented it! Be prepared. Be equipped. In the Word. In faith.
 
Ken Pullen
Saturday, September 18th, 2021
ACP — A Crooked Path
 

WEEKEND ESSAY

How woke totalitarians conquered America

With the Cold War battles won, a niche theory of institutional racism that took hold in colleges has become a cultural revolution which is trying to silence all its critics, writes Gerard Baker

By Gerard Baker

Friday, September 17, 2021

Reprinted from The Times (London)

In October 2017 William Jacobson, a professor of law at Cornell University and, as a conservative, something of an endangered species among Ivy League academics, was invited to deliver a lecture at Vassar College in upstate New York. The event had been organised by a group of conservative students, and was intended to challenge the climate of repression at colleges and universities that had steadily banished views dissenting from the progressive orthodoxies. The title of the talk was “An Examination of Hate Speech and Free Speech on College Campuses”.

The notice of the event was met by unironic rage. Student groups organised to protest and object and try to have the talk cancelled. The Vassar authorities quickly sided with the protesters and the college president condemned the speech.

The lecture nevertheless went ahead, under heavy security. College administrators arranged for students both to protest and to retreat to “safe spaces” where they could be insulated from the offensive views. One of the safe spaces was the library, where distraught students were led by guides bearing torches and offering comfort. In a cordoned-off section they were given colouring books and pencils to help channel the trauma of finding themselves in the vicinity of someone with views they found objectionable. Back at Cornell, the professor met further hostility. “Twenty-one of my colleagues, alumni groups, the dean, all denounced me. Their goal was to marginalise me and silence me.”

It’s easy to laugh off the snowflakes on college campuses. Wacky left-wing political dogma and attempts to ostracise those who oppose it have long been a prominent feature of university life. But the slide into ideological totalitarianism has taken a headlong plunge in recent years. And, in a development that has darker implications for democracy, the intolerant creed that commands adherence to its woke nostrums about race, gender and sexual identity increasingly dominates not just universities but high schools and even elementary education, media outlets, much of the corporate world and, under a Democratic Party that has shifted sharply to the left, the federal government.

Jacobson has become something of a bête noire. Shunned by his colleagues, demonised by his college administration, he is, however, protected by academic tenure. He is in no doubt about the threat to those who don’t have that security. “People are scared of losing their jobs and the left has weaponised this to drive people out . . . most people don’t have the option of doing something else,” he says. “They couldn’t get me but they can silence others.”

In 2017 a Google engineer was fired for circulating some comments on why women were not as prominent in technical engineering as men. Last year a New York Times senior editor was forced out after he published a column by a Republican senator calling for tougher law enforcement measures against rioters after the death of George Floyd. Social media companies have blocked accounts of critics of the modern progressive orthodoxy. The fate of these high-profile cases has had a chilling effect. A university professor who wishes to remain anonymous told me: “Everyone I talk to worries about being cancelled. But for many the dangers of speaking out are a threat to livelihoods.”

What started as college playground antics — politically correct neologisms, consciousness-raising and anti-bias theology — has become mainstream and deadly serious. The extirpation of dissenting opinion goes beyond simply limiting or “cancelling” people who speak out in opposition to prevailing orthodoxies. It is actively and successfully promoting policies that replace historical discrimination with a modern form that sorts Americans into racial identities and then prioritises some over others.

Joe Biden’s administration has committed itself to a legal overhaul that promotes “equity” — terminology carefully chosen to distinguish it from “equality”. Its aim is not to equalise opportunity but to equalise outcomes. The project is yielding results. One recent example: white business owners in New York have been denied special public funds to help rebuild from the pandemic because their skin is the wrong colour.

How did an intellectual movement that started as a fringe theory among campus radicals become the driving ideology behind so much of American life? The answer, as Ernest Hemingway wrote of going bankrupt, is two ways: gradually, then suddenly.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016, with his often crudely nativist rhetoric, the left’s angry backlash to it and the killing of George Floyd by a police officer last year seem to have provided the sparks that lit this ideological conflagration. But there was plenty of kindling that had been laid over the previous few decades.

At the core of this cultural revolution is an idea known as critical race theory that emerged more than three decades ago. The intellectual movement, first given a name by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, was a successor ideology to traditional Marxist thought. The essence of the theory was that America, and to a large extent all western capitalist societies, is inherently and systemically racist (and patriarchal). Its institutions and rules reflect the hegemony of the white male and the promotion of his distinctive interests to the detriment of others.

The key point was that the system itself is structurally flawed and notions of “equality” that well-meaning progressives espoused were invalid. The ideas of what constitutes virtue and value in such a society must be inherently racist and so our concepts of objectivity, fairness, even logic, reason and scientific method, are all shot through with white oppressive characteristics.

Just as Marxists saw the oppression of workers by capitalism in all aspects of life, so these postmodernists see racial and gender oppression. A professor of classics at Princeton is campaigning for the abolition of classics as a discipline because it perpetuates ideas of whiteness.

A key feature is the emphasis on praxis — that it is not simply a critique, a theory, but an organising principle for society at a micro and macro level. It is essential to this world view to affirmatively reject the existing order. This explains why it is so exclusionary and intolerant: in a neat circularity it argues that challenges to it are themselves acts of oppression.

No one seriously challenges the proposition that racism persists in America and that minorities continue to suffer from historical injustice, in economics, law and criminal justice and education. But anti-racism goes well beyond this premise. Anti-discrimination policies, the new thinking says, are incapable of redressing fundamental inequality; that can only be achieved through an immersive rejection of the system itself. Modern proponents of the idea, such as the writer Ibram X Kendi, insist this means white people must acknowledge their sinfulness. He and his followers are paid handsomely by company human resources departments to re-educate their workforces.

To some degree this modern frenzy has its roots deep in American culture: this is still a Puritan people who must acknowledge and expiate their sinfulness. Some commentators have noticed the similarities between the kinds of public shaming of those who commit supposed breaches of the modern faith and the treatment of transgressors in 17th-century New England. But there are several developments in the past three decades that help explain the propulsion of the ideology to the forefront of American life.

It is probably no accident that, as a successor to Marxist thinking, this ideology emerged right at the end of the Cold War. Critiques of fundamental flaws in western capitalism were popular on campuses in the 1960s and 1970s but the intellectual traction they gained more widely was tempered by the existential threat posed by capitalism’s unappealing alternative. The paradox was that, having won the Cold War in large part because of the evident superiority of its liberal values, America and the wider West found itself easier prey to alternative far-left critiques.

Jason Hill, who was born in Jamaica and teaches philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, faced his cancellation battle defending the former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s policies in the West Bank. Threatened with a student boycott, backed by leaders of the academic community, he sued the university for defamation. “The U.S. has lost its energy,” he says. “The West as a whole lost its sense of purpose and meaning and significance and there arose all kinds of alternative ideologies to fill that vacuum.”

As academics signed up to critical race and similar theories, they tended to hire like-minded people and dissonant voices dwindled. Some surveys estimate the ratio of progressive academics to conservatives is in the range of 40 to one at the big universities. The rapid growth in the number of administrators at colleges played a part, too. They tended to be aggressive promoters of the ideas of racial and gender equity and imposed hiring rules that required diversity. It’s obligatory at most universities for applicants for academic posts to include a statement of how they plan to address racial and gender diversity challenges.

As colleges were becoming populated with radicals, the students they were admitting were more open to the kind of exclusionary teaching that delegitimised opposing views. In their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, the social scientists Greg Lukianoff and Professor Jonathan Haidt trace much of the intolerance on campus to a climate of “safetyism”. In the past 20 years, they say, educators and even parents have become obsessed with emotional fragility. They cite three “great untruths” that have come to define modern American teaching: “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”; “always trust your feelings”; and “life is a battle between good people and evil people”.

In 2015 Nicholas and Erika Christakis, a husband and wife team of professors at Yale, were denounced by students after she criticised cultural hypersensitivity about Halloween costumes. In a confrontation with some of their critics that went viral on YouTube and recalled scenes from China’s Cultural Revolution, Mr. Christakis was told that he and his wife had inflicted “hurt” and “pain” and needed to apologise.

As this new generation of fragile young minds have entered the workforce in the past decade, in technology, media and other companies, they have brought their pathologies and ideologies into the office. News organisations, driven in part by these demographic and cultural changes, have changed public discourse. A recent study of archives of big newspapers in the US magazine Tablet showed that the frequency with which the words “racist” and “racism” were used, which had remained essentially stable from 1970 to 2010, had increased as much as tenfold in the past ten years in newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, most of this increase occurring well before Trump was elected. This seems to have had the effect of changing public views about the salience of race, too. In that timeframe the proportion of Democrats saying that racism was a big problem in the US, a number that had been declining for more than a decade, suddenly more than doubled.

It’s possible that differing attitudes to Barack Obama’s presidency may have played a role in this. The arrival of a black man in the White House might paradoxically have made some Americans believe that not enough progress had been made in other aspects of race. But Obama’s experience itself shows just how much American debate has shifted and polarised in such a short time. Obama’s 2008 campaign aimed to highlight the longstanding blight of racism but his message of “Hope” was also intended to emphasise America’s enduring and extraordinary capacity to overcome such problems through unity.

This idea of a post-racial American idealism — Martin Luther King’s message — was best illustrated by Obama’s relationship with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Wright was given to fiery homilies denouncing America as systemically and irreparably racist, its government imperialist and white supremacist. The toxicity of his views were such that Obama denounced them as “divisive and destructive” and gave “comfort to those who prey on hate”. Yet today, 13 years later, Wright’s views are more or less those taught by “diversity, equity and inclusion” trainers in corporate HR departments to help their employees be “anti-racist”.

The biggest change of all, however, may have come in an unexpected cultural revolution among chief executives. After the death of Floyd, amid protests across the country, companies rushed to identify with the aims of Black Lives Matter. Corporate leaders say this merely reflects a wider trend of social awareness among capitalists, with social justice taking its place alongside environmentalism in company priorities. Critics are more cynical. In his new book Woke Inc, Vivek Ramaswamy attributes corporate America’s sudden embrace of some of the most extreme examples of the critical race creed to opportunism. “After the 2008 financial crisis, corporations feared the wrath of the old ‘Occupy Wall Street’ left, so they got in bed with the newly ascendant woke left instead. According to the new woke left, the real sources of disempowerment weren’t economic injustice or poverty. Rather, they were racial injustice, misogyny, bigotry and so forth. Corporate America agreed to lend its money and legitimacy to that new woke movement, as a way of defanging Occupy Wall Street and related movements. It worked.”

Perhaps the rise of this quasi-totalitarian ideology to the forefront of national life reflects above all the eclipse of American liberalism. It’s not just much of the left that seems to have rejected liberal ideas of free speech and open society. Progressive authoritarianism of the left has a counterpart on the right; not just in some of the ugly language of Trump and his supporters but among conservative intellectuals. A political philosopher such as Professor Patrick Deneen, of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, says in his book Why Liberalism Failed that the ideals we thought triumphant have created a social dystopia: an anomie engendered by materialism and the extreme permissive nature of liberalism that has resulted in the destruction of lives, livelihoods, families and communities.

Polling suggests a more optimistic view. Most Americans reject the extremism of woke authoritarianism and haven’t yet given up on liberal values. But the centre is shrinking and as voices in dissent are either silenced or marginalised, America is looking more and more like a giant university campus.