My latest version of Internet “sport” consists of skimming social media comments sections under any article even vaguely skeptical of Critical Race Theory, to find the morons (with apologies to actual morons) who rush to obnoxiously inform all us misinformed peons that “no, that’s not what CRT is.” The “not-real-CRT” narrative is rapidly displacing the “not-real-socialism” narrative as the preferred virtue signal of the illiberal Jacobins and brownshirts engaging in a social media Reign of Terror against anyone who dares speak out against leftist orthodoxy. The Facebook share of WSJ writer William Galston’s recent column, which echoes my own conclusions (here, here, here, and here, to list just a few) that CRT is fundamentally anti-liberty, anti-rationality, plainly racist, contrary to the fundamentals upon which this society was built, and a backdoor to a form (new or old) of authoritarian collectivism, was no exception. It’s become de mode to mock anyone who points out the Marxist roots and aspirations underlying CRT.
Their ever-increasing stridency suggests that there’s a fear that the effort to get CRT into the baseline public education curriculum will be halted in its tracks. Nearly half the states in the nation have legislation banning the teaching of CRT in public schools either pending or already enacted. Victor Davis Hanson’s recent column suggests that the “critical race theory craze is reaching peak woke, or is already on the downslope, and my armchair perusal of the political landscape notes that this isn’t an outlier idea – people are waking up to the realities of woke, and they’re pushing back.
A different observation in Hanson’s column caught my eye and prompted today’s thoughts:
We know from the failed Soviet system and from the French Revolution that the most mediocre in society became its most eager auditors of correct behavior.
I flashed back to a bit I wrote two years ago, sub-titled “The Rise of the Hall Monitors.”
Indeed, thanks to social media, too much free time, and the encouragement of blatant and destructive tribalism by people who actually want society to collapse, we are awash in Bobby Bradys, eager to wield as much power as they can claim for themselves by bullying us into quiet acceptance of their new order. They’re modern day Commissars, wielding the “soft power” that is bullying and cancellation. These purported champions of the oppressed have become the very oppressors they claim to be fighting.
Commissars do not produce anything or serve anybody, but only monitor thoughts and speech to ascertain the purity of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are not just a drain on the productive sector but will insidiously destroy it, since their currency is to ensure a timid, obsequiousness and banal orthodoxy.
Fortunately, that soft power is a bit easier to resist than the coercive power of an authoritarian State that might see Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a roadmap rather than a cautionary tale. People are, increasingly, ignoring and mocking the hall commissars of today’s Left, and many good-minded liberals are breaking from their ranks.
Unfortunately, our elected leaders are fans of the hall commissars, and are encouraging their behavior. In a stunning reveal, the Biden Administration informed us that it was working with Facebook, flagging posts it considers problematic. That sort of collaboration completely undermines social media companies’ argument that they’re independent, private-sector entities protected by the First Amendment from any sort of government action against their censorious ways (the fact that they have certain protections against lawsuit written into law is another rebuttal of that argument, but that’s its own story).
This collaboration is being spun as merely being about public health, i.e. to stop the spreading of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine, but that’s just a load of bullshit. Once the collaboration has been normalized, it will without any doubt be used to quash other “problematic” content, including things that might be perceived as hurting the administration in its electoral goals. The RICO Act, enacted in 1970 to go after organized crime, is now used wherever a prosecutor needs a new angle on a target, regardless of any lack of mob ties. Any tool in a politician’s toolbox will be misused at some point in time.
The nation is in utter chaos right now, and it’s a chaos entirely of the Left’s making.
In 2008, Obama’s charisma put the Democrats in full control of the federal government. Misreading the populace, they set about on a transformational agenda, not merely one that reflected the usual left-right squabbles. Rebuked in 2010, they nevertheless doubled down, driving leftward by a very vocal minority of progressive-activists and Obama’s hubris. They lost a thousand legislative seats across Obama’s tenure, but still failed to heed the message. Their mania about a floodgates policy at the southern border was correctly judged by Trump as the wedge issue of the day, and he crafted a nativist-populist message that put him into the White House. Democrats ran Biden as a moderate conciliator against Trump’s personal flaws and erratic behavior, and promptly made the same mistake as in 2008: misreading the populace. Biden sprinted leftward, first misconstruing the rejection of Trump as a demand for the reversal of all his policies and actions, then presuming that the nation could be dragged into a massive progressive reimagining without much fuss.
Today, the southern border is anarchy, law-and-order is a joke, our institutions are being rapidly corroded from within by woke, race agitators are dominating the public forum, children are being told to look at each other with racist eyes, inflation is rearing its ugly head even as we’re told that printing trillions of dollars won’t cause inflation, the Biden Administration’s schizophrenic management of the pandemic is making the previous administration appear positively competent, higher education has grown so toxic that an entire generation is being turned into nervous, miserable, sniveling betas… I could go on and on.
Oh, and the people and organizations we are told are the vanguard of a better society are actively voicing support for the Communist regime in Cuba, even as we are told we are crazy for thinking there is a socialist or Marxist undercurrent in their policies and beliefs.
At the core of this is a cadre of Dunning-Krugerites, people who have deluded themselves into an arrogant certitude that the woke way is the only way. Theirs is the new noblesse-oblige, the belief that it is a moral imperative they reorder society per their twisted vision, and if they have to crack a few skulls along the way, well, that’s the price of revolution.
A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. — Che Guevara
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We see them say that the detractors of CRT don’t understand it, and are reading into it things that just aren’t there.
Couldn’t the same be said for some of its practitioners, or more likely they see it as an avenue for a more ardent message.