Tag Archive for: Frankfurt School

Dialectics: The Prime Weapon Destroying Western Civilization

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“Dialectics” is a term used to describe a method of philosophical argument that involves some sort of contradictory process between opposing sides.

For weeks now I have been ruminating on a paper or post about the state of the dialectic attack on Western civilization via every single imaginable metric. That is to say, think of a value or a compartment or a taboo that is part of the Western culture and thought process and it is under attack. From national feelings to sexual habits to your traditional form of diet in the West.

A lot of people get it at one level, but at the meta, its quite a well constructed ceaseless attack, created and launched via communist and postmodern think tanks, some of which date back over a hundred years.

The evidence is overflowing. So permeated is our culture now that you can basically play a version of dialectic Pin the Tail on the Donkey and win every time. You could blindfold yourself and spin around and walk forward with your arm out and whatever you stop against is probably an example.

Each day that goes by, my list of examples grows, and of course, the project becomes more intimidating. So I have decided to do a kind of proto-post on the subject. Perhaps each time I add a data point, I’ll do it in a separate post and link back to this one. It may be messy, but at least the ideas will be out there.

Let’s begin with this video on Diversity training:

What the makers of this otherwise excellent video fail to understand, can be seen in the last couple of sentences:

“Whatever the explanation, it is bad business in the long run”.

See, it’s meant to be. That is what many who are proper critics of the revolution that is now taking place, do not recognize or express. It is meant to ruin not just business, but all aspects of cooperation in our culture between all people by grouping them in various ways and setting them at each other. In fact they may not even recognize it as rhetorical/dialectic weapons in an actual war on Western thought, and the very concept of the individual itself. (My personal theory as to the nature of the vaccine mandates, was specifically to in part or in whole, dissolve the concept of the individual in our own heads and form an almighty collective we put before ourselves, guided by a God like state.) This is why people must be lumped into groups as the attackers define those groups, and set us all against each other. To not do so, is somehow racist, when in fact racism is a key part of the strategy by the leftist revolutionaries.

Another example is sexual preferences, which have been turned into sexual identity now. So much so, that cross walks are sometimes painted with rainbow colours, and crossing lights for pedestrians are sometimes modified to show homosexual people or couples. This is, as we now know, because the most important thing about crossing a busy street is celebrating men having sex with other men.

Much like this flagpole in front of a posh prestigious private school in Ottawa Canada: Photo of flagpole.

Because after the National flag and the crest of the school, the most important thing about educating children from grade 5 to 12, is celebrating sexual identity and practice of anyone engaging in non-conventional sex acts and identifying as being part of groups with similar prefrences at the expence, it would seem, of more meaningful identities. This is so important, they actually have to flag the school with it.

How long till that flag finds its way to the top? And then what is known as dialectic negation could occur. The replacement of the National flag, which is anathema to communism, with group identities which maintain acrimony and division. Until of course its all the party flag which by then will be a hammer and sickle.

Perhaps Trudeau’s first minister of health could design it. After all, her training was entirely in graphic arts. Her replacement is a graduate of the communist think tank university, The London School of Economics. Neither of them have any medical training.

Then we have the Rogers Communications building on Richmond Rd. in Ottawa. One of the HQ buildings for Canada’s main cable TV, internet, and cell phone providers.

Rogers is more prepared than the private school. They understand that the dialectic attack is part of a never ending revolution, which is what communism is. Their flag is the most up-to-date one with the bits added for Trans and whatever else has been added in the last year or so. At this point the Rainbow flag is at risk of being called racist since it is insufficiently inclusive of whatever new ‘groups’ or ‘communities’ have been created as part of the ongoing dialectic.

These photos are all from this August, 2022. “Pride Month”, which itself is revealing since it’s not “Gay Pride” anymore as, like the flag, its not inclusive enough, was all of  June.

(Also noteworthy is that the literally millions upon millions of young, healthy, productive and nearly entirely men, who sacrificed themselves for our freedom and culture and rule of law, get half a day a year to be celebrated and remembered, while people who like to have sex in unusual ways get a whole month.)

Two months later, and the flags are hanging off buildings which are highly symbolic of important aspects of our culture.

To be clear about the highly annoying and too-often repeated word, “Dialectic”, I mean one thing. Operationally defined for the purpose of this post: dialectics is the weaponization and re-tasking of language in order to be used against classical thought and non-communist, or counter-revolutionary people.

It takes many forms. One common form would be to define a word in such a way that the user of that word, no matter what the context or how that person may use or understand that word, or how its has always been used up until now, can now be made to be guilty of an actual crime based on the new assignment of meaning to that term by communist groups. But that is just one form of dialectics and one worth understanding. Dialectics are always selectively enforced. More accurately, they appear to be selectively enforced. But it is better to see it as a calculated form of weaponized language, the purpose of which is always to move the culture and the law ever leftwards.

When for example, it is not an actual crime to use one of the selected words, they can cite the use of that word to destroy the person in much the same way as if it was. Sometimes worse. I think it was Wendy Mesley of CBC who used, (now get this cause its an example with an example), “The N word” OFF AIR near colleagues, while quoting someone else who used “the N word” to try and show how horrible that person was because they used “the N word” and was fired or otherwise castigated and punished in some manner by the state broadcaster for doing so. The fact that she was waging a dialectic attack against a hated non-leftist by quoting him wasn’t important. It was the blasphemous utterance of the word itself, now more fetish than language, which caused her to metaphorically be put in stocks and have fruit thrown at her.

Photo: US Embassy August 21, 2022 Ottawa

The government funded media in Canada, mostly CBC, CTV and Global, but City News, whatever that is, and other news orgs. use the same MO.

They do not cover news and views. They wage dialectic attacks against targets they wish to destroy. Mostly ones which could be properly described as believing in individual choices for themselves and real non-racism as racism was originally sold to us.

In essence, there is only one metric at play in the developed world now. And its very easy to understand. Any revolutionary act will be amplified, rewarded, normalized and in all ways promoted. If the act is illegal, such as throwing a firebomb at police in Portland or Seattle, or killing a Trump supporter who is an unarmed woman-veteran waved into the Capitol building in the US, won’t be punished and the person who committed these acts will be protected. Any counter-revolutionary actions will be punished. Even if the act was fully legal and harmed no one, it can and will be construed as “hate speech” along the lines of Marcusean Discourse theory. Suddenly speaking a simple empirical truth will be a crime, and if they cannot make it an actual crime, they will doxx you, attack you in other ways, cause you to lose your job or punish you in legal and illegal ways. This is a full scale war for all the marbles. It just happens to be using information warfare for the most part at this time.

I have witnessed this myself for days at the building referred to as “The United People of Canada building on St. Patrick. Media will fire astonishingly awful attacks with question marks against the people within the organization, while asking softball questions to hate-filled protestors on their lawn. One question I heard repeatedly was, “Can’t you understand that people in this area would be frightened when they see vehicles here that are decorated in a similar fashion to the ones in the convoy when they were so traumatized by the protest?” This isn’t a question. It’s the crown attorney grilling a suspect when he knows they have no lawyer who will object. Had that question been asked as a “guilty by association” issue about any in-fashion group, we all know what would happen to the questioner. Imagine it about fearing a racial or sexual orientation group because of the imputed experience of people with other members of that group. You can see what I mean.

Photo: Rude and aggressive protestor who claimed to represent the area

I suppose this will do for a start. If anyone made it this far, my sincere thanks.

There will be MUCH more on the United People of Canada soon. It does appear that it was Ottawa’s Mayor who is interfering with their rent payments. I really hope they have a good lawyer.

AUTHOR

Eeyore

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Trump’s ban on Critical Race Theory, explained

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Does Critical Race Theory promote racial harmony or does it “sow division” as the Trump administration claims? And what is its relation, if any, to Marxism?

With the November election just around the corner, it’s only to be expected that President Trump would seek to rally conservative voters and drive his supporters to the polls. So, when his administration, on September 4, instructed the federal government to eliminate all training in “Critical Race Theory,” some thought it was just a red-meat stunt to excite the Republican base. Others saw it as an act of right-wing censorship and an obstruction of racial progress.

In truth, there’s much more to this development than mere politicization and censorship.

Here’s a breakdown of what the administration is doing and why it’s a welcome move.

The executive memo

“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought wrote in the executive memorandum.

“Employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism,’” Vought explained. “According to press reports, in some cases these training [sic] have further claimed that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.”

The order instructed federal agencies to identify and eliminate any contracts or spending that train employees in “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” “or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

The exposé

How did it “come to the President’s attention,” and what press reports is Vought referring to?

Well, President Trump is known to watch Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. And days before the memo was issued, Carlson had on journalist Christopher Rufo to discuss his multiple reports uncovering the extent to which Critical Race Theory (CRT) was being used in federal training programs.

“For example, Rufo claimed, the Treasury Department recently hired a diversity trainer who said the U.S. was a fundamentally White supremacist country,” wrote Sam Dorman for the Fox News web site, “and that White people upheld the system of racism in the nation. In another case, which Rufo discussed with Carlson last month, Sandia National Laboratories, which designs nuclear weapons, sent its white male executives to a mandatory training in which they, according to Rufo, wrote letters apologizing to women and people of color.”

Rufo challenged President Trump to use his executive authority to extirpate CRT from the federal government.

The debate

CNN’s Brian Stelter (as well as Rufo himself) traced Trump’s decision directly to the independent investigative journalist’s self-proclaimed “one-man war” on CRT, of which the recent Carlson appearance was only the latest salvo.

Selter characterized Trump’s move as a reactionary attack on the current national “reckoning” on race. He cited the Washington Post’s claim that, “racial and diversity awareness trainings are essential steps in helping rectify the pervasive racial inequities in American society, including those perpetuated by the federal government.”

So which is it? Is CRT “divisive” and “toxic” or is it “rectifying” and “anti-racist”?

Intellectual ancestry

To answer that, it would help to trace CRT to its roots. Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory, which began as an academic movement in the 1930s. Critical Theory emphasizes the “critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures,” as Wikipedia states. Critical Race Theory does the same, with a focus on racial power structures, especially white supremacy and the oppression of people of color.

The “power structure” prism stems largely from Critical Theory’s own roots in Marxism—Critical Theory was developed by members of the Marxist “Frankfurt School.” Traditional Marxism emphasized economic power structures, especially the supremacy of capital over labor under capitalism. Marxism interpreted most of human history as a zero-sum class war for economic power.

“According to the Marxian view,” wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises, “human society is organized into classes whose interests stand in irreconcilable opposition.”

Mises called this view a “conflict doctrine,” which opposed the “harmony doctrine” of classical liberalism. According to the classical liberals, in a free market economy, capitalists and workers were natural allies, not enemies. Indeed, in a free society all rights-respecting individuals were natural allies.

A bitter inheritance

Critical Race Theory arose as a distinct movement in law schools in the late 1980s. CRT inherited many of its premises and perspectives from its Marxist ancestry.

The pre-CRT Civil Rights Movement had emphasized equal rights and treating people as individuals, as opposed to as members of a racial collective. “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Martin Luther King famously said.

In contrast, CRT dwells on inequalities of outcome, which it generally attributes to racial power structures. And, as we’ve seen from the government training curricula, modern CRT forthrightly judges white people by the color of their skin, prejudging them as racist by virtue of their race. This race-based “pre-trial guilty verdict” of racism is itself, by definition, racist.

The classical liberal “harmony doctrine” was deeply influential in the movements to abolish all forms of inequality under the law: from feudal serfdom, to race-based slavery, to Jim Crow.

But, with the rise of Critical Race Theory, the cause of racial justice became more influenced by the fixations on conflict, discord, and domination that CRT inherited from Marxism.

Social life was predominantly cast as a zero-sum struggle between collectives: capital vs. labor for Marxism, whites vs. people of color for CRT.

A huge portion of society’s ills were attributed to one particular collective’s diabolical domination: capitalist hegemony for Marxism, white supremacy for CRT.

Just as Marxism demonized capitalists, CRT vilifies white people. Both try to foment resentment, envy, and a victimhood complex among the oppressed class it claims to champion.

Traditional Marxists claimed that all capitalists benefit from the zero-sum exploitation of workers. Similarly, CRT “diversity trainers” require white trainees to admit that they “benefit from racism.”

Traditional Marxists insisted that bourgeois thoughts were inescapably conditioned by “class interest.” In the same way, CRT trainers push the notion that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” as a result of their whiteness.

Given the above, it should be no wonder that CRT has been criticized as “racist” and “divisive.”

Reckoning or retrogression?

Supporters of CRT cast it as a force for good in today’s “rectifying reckoning” over race.

But CRT’s neo-Marxist orientation only damages race relations and harms the interests of those it claims to serve.

In practice, the class war rhetoric of Marxism was divisive and toxic for economic relations. And, far from advancing the interests of the working classes, it led to mass poverty and devastating famines, not to mention staggering inequality between the elites and the masses.

Today, the CRT-informed philosophy, rhetoric, and strategy of the Black Lives Matter organization (whose leadership professed to be “trained Marxists”) is leading to mass riots, looting, vandalism, and assault. The divisive violence has arrested progress for the cause of police reform, destroyed countless black-owned small businesses, and economically devastated many black communities.

Those who truly wish to see racial harmony should dump the neo-Marxists and learn more about classical liberalism. (FEE.org is the perfect place to start.)

So much for CRT being a force for good. Of course, even horrible ideas are protected by the First Amendment. The government should never use force to suppress people from expressing ideas, speech, or theories it dislikes.

Critics insist that President Trump is engaged in this kind of censorship by targeting CRT.

Not so.

No one is banning White Fragility, the blockbuster CRT manifesto. No one is locking up those who preach CRT or ordering mentions of it stripped from the internet.

The memo simply says that taxpayer dollars will no longer be spent promulgating this theory to federal government employees. As heads of the executive branch, presidents have wide latitude to make the rules for federal agencies under their control. Deciding how money is spent certainly falls under their proper discretion—and it is always done with political preferences in mind, one way or the other.

It is not censorship for Trump to eliminate funding for CRT, anymore than it was “censorship” for the Obama administration to choose to tie federal contracts to a business’s embrace of LGBT rights.

Elections have consequences, one of the most obvious being that the president gets to run the executive branch. If we don’t want the president’s political preferences to be so significant in training programs, then we should simply reduce the size of government and the number of bureaucrats.

In the meantime, stripping the federal government of the divisive, toxic, and neo-Marxist ideology of Critical Race Theory is a positive development for the sake of racial justice and harmony.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

COLUMN BY

Dan Sanchez

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in-chief of FEE.org. He co-hosts the weekly web show FEEcast, serving as the resident “explainer.” … 

Tyler Brandt

Tyler Brandt is a Senior Associate Editor at FEE. He is a graduate of UW-Madison with a B.A. in Political Science. In college, Tyler was a FEE Campus Ambassador, President of his campus YAL chapter, and… 

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and the Eugene S. Thorpe Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education. He was previously a Media and Journalism Fellow at… 

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