Launched nationally only 13 months ago, PublicSq. — a new “parallel economy” for conservatives — went public on the New York Stock Exchange this week.
PublicSq. aims to be the platform where “freedom-loving” Americans can find “quality products, services, and exclusive discounts from values-aligned businesses.” The company describes its values as “Pro-Life, Pro-Family, Pro-Freedom.”
Company founder and CEO Michael Seifert gave viewers a behind the scenes look into the launch, discussing the goals he has for the company moving forward. He was joined by PublicSq. investors Donald Trump Jr. and Omeed Malik. Malik is a minority owner of the Daily Caller.
Watch as Don Jr., Omeed Malik, and Michael Seifert take us behind the scenes of the New York Stock Exchange as they celebrate PublicSq. going public. pic.twitter.com/lJmTP6FRgj
Seifert explained, “I think a lot of people view going public as sort of an exit, or a finish line, and for us, it’s fundamentally the opposite. We have a country to save.” One of the main perks of going public, he continued, is “our consumers being owners in the platform.”
Speaking on his desire to get involved in the company, Trump Jr. explained that “half the market’s been ostracized by woke corporate America.”
“We wanted to create a place where people can find businesses and where businesses can find consumers that share a common values base,” he added.
He hopes PublicSq. will “inspire people to be more vocal about the basic tenets of America — freedom of speech, freedom of commerce.”
On his vision for the company, Malik explained that “patriotic capitalism is putting the country first in our economic decisions. You have to have a digital platform where people can find each other.”
“The foundation of any economy is an exchange,” he continued, “and in the parallel patriotic economy, it’s PublicSq.”
Nick Ayers, another investor, applauded PublicSq for already having over 55,000 small and medium businesses on the platform and over one million consumers.
Chants of “USA” erupted on the floor of the stock exchange as the PublicSq. team rang the opening bell.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2023-07-30 06:42:082023-08-01 09:24:28Take An Inside Look At The New Conservative Company Fighting Back Against Corporate America’s Woke Agenda
Activists abusing innocent childhood reading schemes to push gender ideology to infants make some parents feel queasy.
The recent controversial feature on parents raising gender-neutral “Theybies” broadcast on Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes documentary strand caused quite a stir. Ideologically motivated parents were seen declaring their belief in referring to their children purely via fashionable they/them pronouns, in the name of letting toddlers decide who they really are, rather than simply letting biology settle the matter for them, as is traditional.
“We’re not trying to eliminate gender,” protested one social scientist and “gender creative expert” wheeled out to justify the experiment. “We’re actually trying to show how limitless gender can be.” Critics may protest that children need limits, and that such child-rearing methods will simply make kids confused, but supporters may equally argue parents have the right to raise their own offspring how they personally feel fit.
The latter argument may have some merit: but what happens when these same people capture our institutions and try to raise other people’s children along these same bizarre intersex lines too, whether other kids’ parents like it or not?
‘They’ came from outer space
One common practice amongst such parents is giving their Theybies weird, non-identifiably male or female names, like Zoomer, Searyl, Zyler, Sparrow or various other things which sound like Pokémon. Another oddly-named gender-neutral infant is Tala, who lives in the English county of Hertfordshire, but at least Tala has an excuse for being so unusually christened – for Tala is an alien.
Unveiled by Hertfordshire County Council in 2022, Tala is a cute cartoon mascot intended to encourage small children to use local library services. Tala replaced the now vanished Bookstart Bear, a previous incumbent who was also happily genderless – but for completely innocent reasons. Wishing to appeal to boys and girls equally, previous librarians had quietly failed to address the hitherto irrelevant issue of Bookstart Bear’s genitalia, pragmatically referring to the beast in promotional literature simply by name, not pronouns, so as not to put one gender or the other off from borrowing books.
Tala is fundamentally different. Intended as a “vibrant community asset”, Tala’s very name is an appeal to the Great God Diversity, having various meanings in global languages like Arabic, Polynesian and Filipino. But Tala also has very definite pronouns – they/them ones, like a true Theybie. “We hope that families love Tala as much as we loved creating them!” said council representatives, thereby getting toddlers grammatically confused as soon as they so much as set foot inside a library building.
Learning an alien language
When stubborn parents of local Hebies and Shebies heard Tala referred to as “they” by library staff, they took to social media to complain about this “trans alien” in their midst, concerns later amplified by prominent British trans-sceptical feminist Maya Forstater. In response, the council denied Tala was transgender, calling the idea “grossly misleading and wildly inaccurate”. But their denial sounded disingenuous: “In the absence of a gender for this alien creature, we simply use gender-neutral language when talking about them to the public.”
Gender-neutral such language may be, but it is not politically neutral; promoting gender-neutral pronouns to babies helps entrench such concepts in the public mind, particularly that of the next generation.
Accordingly, the queer-friendly press jumped to Tala’s defence, with Pink News mocking Forstater’s “truly confounding obsession with the sex, gender and reproduction habits of a made-up library alien”. Hard-left website WorkersLiberty.org (inadvertently accurate slogan: “Reason in Revolt”) acted similarly, although it did take time to note approvingly that, as Tala wore gender-neutral dungarees and bobble hat, the tiny alien “sort of dresses like a queer university student” of lesbian tastes.
The basic implication was clear: local parents and TERFs like Forstater were just suspicious loons, seeing an imaginary agenda of leftists trying to queer their kids where none in fact existed. But were they really so paranoid?
The elephant in the schoolroom
Tala’s case is not without parallel when it comes to using kids’ books as a Trojan Horse (or, as below, Trojan Elephant) to proselytize LGBTQ+ themes to unknowing children. In 2019, Muslim parents in the UK rebelled against the imposition of the gay-friendly teaching-scheme “No Outsiders” in their primary schools. Partly created by a gay teacher named Andrew Moffat, who in 2014 had resigned from his post following parental complaints about him promoting homosexuality to his students, the scheme posed as a pro-tolerance, anti-bullying platform.
As such, liberal media commentators, like Alice Thomson of the London Times, mocked Muslim parents who questioned it as primitive, God-bothering fools, incredulously writing: “They even questioned books about Elmer the patchwork elephant because he is rainbow-colored and so might be teaching their children to be gay.”
Except, as a more honest analysis of the affair on UK Muslim website islam21c.com observed: “Invariably, when describing the “No Outsiders” … programs to the media, Mr Moffat will show the mildest of books, ones that include cute cartoon animals [like Elmer] not fitting into a group because they are a different colour or shape and how they overcome that … It will be stated that the program merely highlights the existence of diversity when it is really much more than that.”
Islam21c.com examined the actual pedagogic academic papers of “No Outsiders”, concluding their authors truly sought to destroy sexual normativity amongst primary-age students by “disrupting [the] heterosexual matrix”. Heterosexual parents were constantly “asserting their majority status” via “the casual and unrestrained use of pronouns”, the academics complained, or showing people photos of their (disappointingly non-gay) wives or husbands at the school gates, and these hideously straight trends had to be counteracted.
However, as Moffat had earlier found, many parents did not appreciate their kids being surreptitiously turned against their normative upbringings in this way. Therefore, as previously shown on MercatorNet, it was thought better to present such schemes as ones in which “homophobia and heteronormativity were challenged as cultural phenomena (like racism)” – i.e. to disingenuously disguise “No Outsiders” as an innocent anti-bullying reading resource, centred upon the theme of not persecuting those who look or act different from their schoolyard peers.
Enter Elmer the Elephant.
Fifty Shades of Grey
The best-selling Elmer books were born in 1968, created by British author David McKee, who was inspired to write them when his mixed-race daughter had racial abuse hurled at her in the street one day. Elmer is an elephant who, like McKee’s daughter in 1960s Britain, was a different colour than all the other animals around him – multi-hued like a patchwork quilt, not grey.
To blend in, Elmer paints himself grey too, using berry-juice. But when rain washes this off, his fellow elephants decide they prefer him this way after all. Accepting his differences, they paint themselves like rainbows too, something initially just an allegory for racial harmony: but which, viewed through woke eyes, has now become a metaphor for queering children instead.
In 2014, Elmer was celebrated by left-wing UK newspaper The Guardian as having “become an LGBT hero!”, with McKee obligingly observing how “I find it interesting that sometimes people write to me and refer to Elmer as a girl in the stories – as Elma.” Like Nelly gone wrong, the elephant had by now indeed packed away his trunk (the one previously hanging politely unseen and unmentioned between his legs) and said hello to the gender circus.
Pink elephants
By 2021, Elmer’s UK publishers Andersen Press had teamed up with gay rights charities to create “new [Gay] Pride assets” for use in schools, “with elephant characters in the colors of the Pride, Lesbian, Bi and Trans flags” for an educationally essential new nationwide brainwashing festival called “School Diversity Week”. Now, rather than simply discouraging racism, “Elmer celebrates everyone’s true colours”, even those of pansexual bigender two-year-olds.
Elmer has even been the subject of a 2011 US doctoral thesis, “Reading Queer Subtexts in Children’s Literature”, which concludes colourful Elmer “is a walking Gay Pride flag”. Apparently, the playful beast “is both gay in the sense that he is delightful and happy and in the sense that he is queer.” Furthermore, “the [hetero]normative assumptions in the text turn out to be false”, meaning Elmer “becomes such a perfect allegory for the closet in which many homosexual children exist.”
Accordingly, Rainbow Elmer’s books are today sold in gay bookshops and appear in LGBTQ+ curriculum guides for teachers. One such document, used in Scotland, takes a leaf from the Andrew Moffat playbook, pointing out that “Although nothing in the story references LGBT people directly, it can be used to start a longer conversation about diversity and difference, and LGBT people or families can be included in those discussions.”
So, when commentators like Alice Thomson smear Muslim parents as paranoid for suspecting their kids might secretly be being groomed to be gay by elephants, they are really just trying to put others off from voicing their (in fact wholly legitimate) concerns by discrediting anyone who speaks out as a delusional extremist nutcase, precisely same tactic used today with Tala the trans alien.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a popular learn-to-read series of books used in British schools called “The Gay Way Reading Scheme“, whose cheerful slogan, “Learn to read the Gay Way!”, ensured they ultimately had to be pulped (their chief competitors, “Through the Rainbow“, benefitted only temporarily …). These days, it increasingly seems that learning to read “the Gay Way” is the only option our kids now have.
Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His next, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience… More by Steven Tucker.
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Three case studies from Canada and Australia about suppression of heterodox opinions in universities.
Two thousand five hundred years ago the Greek playwright Aeschylus is reputed to have said “the first victim of war is truth.” Recent events in the academic world have demonstrated that truth is also a casualty when ideology and commercial interests are at stake.
The most recent case occurred last month at Laval University in Canada, when professor and RNA expert Patrick Provost was suspended without pay for anti-mRNA vaccine comments. Patrick Provost has run an RNA lab for 20 years and has published nearly 100 peer-reviewed studies. In 2003, Provost’s work on the role of microRNA in gene expression was named one of the 10 discoveries of the year by the Quebec Science Magazine.
Based on the government’s own hospitalization and mortality statistics for children, which are both very low, Provost said he believed the risks of Covid-19 vaccination in children could outweigh the benefits because of the potential side-effects from mRNA vaccines, which have only gone through two of the usual four stages of testing required before vaccines are approved for general use.
“I was just doing what I was hired to do,” he said in an interview. “I had some concerns about something, I searched the literature and I prepared a talk and I delivered it to the public. Being censored for doing what I’ve been trained to do — and hired to do — well, it’s hard to believe.”
“As soon as you raise some concerns about vaccines, or side-effects, or complications related to vaccines, then it’s worse than the N-word,” he continued. “You’re condemned by the media, by the government and you’re chased and put down …. We should be able to discuss any ideas — any opinions — and because I expressed opinions that went against the government narrative, I was suspended.”
Regarding the University’s reaction, one might well wonder about the fact that the top 20 pharmaceutical companies spent C$139 billion on Research & Development in 2022, a portion of which went to university researchers. Faculties of medicine are particularly favoured beneficiaries of such funding. And Patrick Provost is a professor at the Faculty of Medicine.
In an entirely different field, geophysicist Peter Ridd was sacked in 2018 by James Cook University, in Australia, for criticizing the work of a colleague studying the Great Barrier Reef. In an email to a journalist, he said the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority “is grossly misusing some scientific ‘data’ to make the case that the Great Barrier Reef is greatly damaged.” Ridd maintained that scientific organisations were “quite happy to spin a story for their own purposes, in this case to demonstrate that there is massive damage to the Great Barrier Reef.”
In a report published last year based, like Provost’s talk, on publicly available data, from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, aka the AIMS, Ridd notes that “the average coral cover as of 2022 is (…) the highest level on record. Figure 2 makes it clear that AIMS has effectively hidden the very good news about the reef between 2016 and 2022 by not publishing the Great Barrier Reef average data since 2017.”
Since 2014, the Australian government has committed A$4 billion to saving the Reef. The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, based at James Cook University, has been a major recipient of this funding. It should be no surprise that Ridd’s colleagues did not take kindly to someone undermining the claims on which their research, and the government funding that subsidizes it, is based.
Back in Canada, Frances Widdowson, a professor of economics, policy, and justice at Mount Royal University in Alberta was fired last year after colleagues and activists called for her termination because she dared to challenge groupthink on indigenous issues. Widdowson had made the self-evident claim that residential schools provided access to education that otherwise might not have been available, which was not an endorsement of the residential school system, but a mere statement of fact. A large percentage of Indian parents willingly opted for residential schools as they were the only way for their children to get an education. Despite the factuality of the claim, she was vilified and called a “denialist.”
Widdowson observes that no one dare question indigenous leaders in Canada these days, which makes it difficult to check their claims about buried remains of children. Widdowson has remarked that while lurid talk of buried indigenous children has circulated for more than 25 years and is “now firmly ensconced within the Canadian consciousness,” there is still no hard evidence to support it. Not a single body has been found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School where 215 bodies were allegedly detected by ground-penetrating radar.
Widdowson’s words in her last hearing at the disciplinary committee just before being fired are worth quoting as a moral to these stories:
“My final thought is that I don’t think it’s understood, not just at Mount Royal but in universities generally, that there is a fundamental conflict between academic universities, academic values and these ideological types of intrusions which are put forward under a number of different names, whether it be diversity, inclusion or equity policies. (…). I’m being pushed out because I can’t accept things that I believe to be untrue. I can’t say that I think something is true when I don’t think it’s true and I think it would be a violation of my academic position to do that. And unfortunately there are people who are either opportunistic or just afraid who won’t stand behind the academic foundation of the university.”
The university is now a house without foundations. We all know what eventually happens to such houses.
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Neo-Marxism is a cultural cancer spreading through America and beyond.
“It’s an important part of society whether you like it or not,” lexicologist Tony Thorne, referring to “wokeness,” toldThe New Yorker’s David Remnick in January. That’s an understatement.
Wokeness is poisoning the Western workplace and constraining small and family businesses, midsized banks, and entrepreneurs while enriching powerful corporations and billionaires. It’s eating away at the capitalist ethos and killing the bottom-up modes of economic ordering and exchange that propelled the United States of America to prosperity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s infecting Gen Z and millennials, who, suffering high depression rates and prone to “quiet quitting,” are not as well off as their parents and grandparents, and who feel isolated and alone even as they enjoy a technological connectivity that’s unprecedented in human history.
What, exactly, is wokeness, and how does it impact business and the wider society?
Subversion
The term as it’s widely used today differs from earlier significations. “Woke”, which plays on African American vernacular, once meant “awake to” or “aware of” social and racial injustices. The term expanded to encompass a wider array of causes from climate change, gun control, and LGTBQ rights to domestic violence, sexual harassment, and abortion.
Now, wielded by its opponents, it’s chiefly a pejorative dismissing the person or party it modifies. It’s the successor to “political correctness,” a catchall idiom that ridicules a broad range of leftist hobbyhorses. Carl Rhodes submits, in Woke Capitalism, that “woke transmuted from being a political call for self-awareness through solidarity in the face of massive racial injustice, to being an identity marker for self-righteousness.”
John McWhorter’s Woke Racism argues that wokeness is religious in character, unintentionally and intrinsically racist, and deleterious to black people. McWhorter, a black linguist, asserts that “white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species.”
Books like Stephen R. Soukup’s The Dictatorship of Woke Capital and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc. highlight the nefarious side of the wokeism adopted by large companies, in particular in the field of asset management, investment, and financial services.
Hypocritical neo-Marxism
Wokeism, in both the affirming and derogatory sense, is predicated on a belief in systemic or structural forces that condition culture and behavior. The phrases “structural racism” or “systemic racism” suggest that rational agents are nevertheless embedded in a network of interacting and interconnected rules, norms, and values that perpetuate white supremacy or marginalise people of color and groups without privilege.
Breaking entirely free from these inherited constraints is not possible, according to the woke, because we cannot operate outside the discursive frames established by long use and entrenched power. Nevertheless, the argument runs, we can decentre the power relations bolstering this system and subvert the techniques employed, wittingly or unwittingly, to preserve extant hierarchies. That requires, however, new structures and power relations.
Corporate executives and boards of directors are unsuspectingly and inadvertently — though sometimes deliberately — caught up in these ideas. They’re immersed in an ideological paradigm arising principally from Western universities. It’s difficult to identify the causative origin of this complex, disparate movement to undo the self-extending power structures that supposedly enable hegemony. Yet businesses, which, of course, are made up of people, including disaffected Gen Zs and millennials, develop alongside this sustained effort to dismantle structures and introduce novel organising principles for society.
The problem is, rather than neutralising power, the “woke” pursue and claim power for their own ends. Criticising systems and structures, they erect systems and structures in which they occupy the center, seeking to dominate and subjugate the people or groups they allege to have subjugated or dominated throughout history. They replace one hegemony with another.
The old systems had problems, of course. They were imperfect. But they retained elements of classical liberalism that protected hard-won principles like private property, due process of law, rule of law, free speech, and equality under the law. Wokeism dispenses with these. It’s about strength and control. And it has produced a corporate-government nexus that rigidifies power in the hands of an elite few.
Consider the extravagant spectacle in Davos, the beautiful resort town that combined luxury and activism at the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, perhaps the largest gathering of self-selected, influential lobbyists and “c suiters” across countries and cultures. This annual event occasions cartoonish portrayals of evil, conspiratorial overlords — the soi-disant saviours paternalistically preaching about planetary improvement, glorifying their chosen burden to shape global affairs. The World Economic Forum has become a symbol of sanctimony and lavish inauthenticity, silly in its ostentation.
The near-ubiquitous celebration of lofty Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategies at the World Economic Forum reveals a seemingly uniform commitment among prominent leaders to harness government to pull companies — and, alas, everyone else — to the left.
ESG is, of course, an acronym for the non-financial standards and metrics that asset managers, bankers, and investors factor while allocating capital or assessing risk. A growing consortium of governments, central banks, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), asset management firms, finance ministries, financial institutions, and institutional investors advocates ESG as the top-down, long-term solution to purported social and climate risks. Even if these risks are real, is ESG the proper remedy?
Attendees of the World Economic Forum would not champion ESG if they did not benefit from doing so. That plain fact doesn’t alone discredit ESG, but it raises questions about ulterior motives: What’s really going on? How will these titans of finance and government benefit from ESG?
Follow the money
One obvious answer involves the institutional investors that prioritise activism over purely financial objectives or returns on investment (for legal reasons, activist investors would not characterise their priorities as such). It has only been a century since buying and selling shares in publicly traded companies became commonplace among workers and households. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), created in response to the Great Depression, isn’t even 100 years old.
Until recently, most investors divested if they owned stock in a company that behaved contrary to their beliefs. They rarely voted their shares or voted only on major issues like mergers and acquisitions. In 2023, however, institutional investors such as hedge funds and asset management firms engage boards of directors, exercise proxy voting, and issue shareholder reports with the primary goal of politicising companies. As intermediaries, they invest pension funds, mutual funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, 401(k)s and more on behalf of beneficiaries who may or may not know what political causes their invested assets support.
If a publicly traded company “goes woke,” consider which entities hold how much of its shares and whether unwanted shareholder pressure is to blame. Consider, too, the role of third-party proxy advisors in the company’s policies and practices.
Big companies go woke to eliminate competition. After all, they can afford the costs to comply with woke regulations whereas small companies cannot. Institutional investors warn of prospective risks of government regulation while lobbying for such regulation. In the United States, under the Biden Administration, woke federal regulations are, unsurprisingly, emerging. Perhaps publicly traded companies will privatise to avoid proposed SEC mandates regarding ESG disclosures, but regulation in other forms and through other agencies will come for private companies too.
The woke should question why they’re collaborating with their erstwhile corporate enemies. Have they abandoned concerns about poverty for the more lucrative industry of identity politics and environmentalism? Have they sold out, happily exploiting the uncouth masses, oppressing the already oppressed, and trading socioeconomic class struggle for the proliferating dogma of race, sexuality, and climate change? As wokeness becomes inextricably tied to ESG, we can no longer say, “Go woke, go broke.” Presently, wokeness is a vehicle to affluence, a status marker, the ticket to the center of the superstructure.
ESG helps the wealthiest to feel better about themselves while widening the gap between the rich and poor and disproportionately burdening economies in developing countries. It’s supplanting the classical liberal rules and institutions that leveled playing fields, engendered equality of opportunity, expanded the franchise, reduced undue discrimination, eliminated barriers to entry, facilitated entrepreneurship and innovation, and empowered individuals to realise their dreams and rise above their station at birth.
When politics is ubiquitous, wokeness breeds antiwokeness. The right caught on to institutional investing; counteroffensives are underway. The totalising politicisation of corporations is a zero-sum arms race in which the right captures some companies while the left captures others.
Soon there’ll be no escaping politics, no tranquil zones, and little space for emotional detachment, contemplative privacy, or principled neutrality; parallel economies will emerge for different political affiliations; noise, fighting, anger, distraction, and division will multiply; every quotidian act will signal a grand ideology. For the woke, “silence is violence”; there’s no middle ground; you must speak up; and increasingly for their opponents as well, you must choose sides.
Which will you choose in this corporatised dystopia? If the factions continue to concentrate and centralise power, classical liberals will have no good options. Coercion and compulsion will prevail over freedom and cooperation. And commerce and command will go hand in hand.
This article has been republished with permission from Mises Wire.
Allen Mendenhall is an associate dean at Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, executive director of the Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty, and Managing Editor of Southern… More by Allen Mendenhall
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A new book describes the importance of memory, history, and national identity in saving America from desolation.
One of the worst sins of the present — not just ours but any present — is its tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn’t trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges as they presented themselves at the time.
— Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story
Jay Leno used to do a regular schtick, Jaywalking, in which he would interview random persons on the street, often young ones, and ask them questions about American history, such as: “Who did America fight in the Revolutionary War?” “How many branches of the U.S. government are there?” “What year was the War of 1812?” Invariably, they could not answer the question, standing mute with Leno’s impertinent microphone pointed at their gaping mouths, or they gave a ridiculous answer.
As deflating as these performances were, it turns out that the state of American education is even worse than Leno documented. Not only does ignorance characterise so much of the citizenry, but Americans are now also imbibing, i.e., being taught, pernicious lies or partial truths about the founding and history of the United States from a tendentious, ideological, and solidly left-wing perspective.
The distortion of history now routinely fed to elementary and high school students, as well as those attending hopelessly “woke” universities and colleges, has produced many young people who are “cynical, entitled, and aggrieved.” Continues Goeglein:
Rather than being thankful, they are indignant. Rather than proud, they feel ashamed. Rather than feeling free, they feel oppressed. Rather than wanting to fix America’s faults, they want to burn America down. Rather than asking what they can do for their country, they demand to know what their country can do for them — and the answer is increasingly to “cease to exist.”
We have created “a citizenry divorced both intellectually and emotionally from its heritage.” Further, “[w]hen we disassociate history — and memory — from facts, we are lost,” writes Goeglein, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, a former Senate staffer, and, presently, vice-president of external and government relations for Focus on the Family.
In a feat of historical and moral inversion, it maintains that the American Revolution was designed primarily to protect the institution of slavery from being destroyed by the British Empire.
Such a one-sided view of history will alienate Americans from one another, given the dissolution of a common identity and love of country, and disregards those who struggled to make the Declaration of Independence a reality in spite of its obvious flaws, such as slavery.
On the matter of slavery, always a leading complaint against America’s founding, the Washington Post’s George Will has rightly observed that the founders’ Constitution “gave slavery no national validation. It left slavery solely a creature of state laws and therefore susceptible to the process that, in fact, occurred — the process of being regionally confined and put on a path to ultimate extinction. Secession was the South’s desperate response when it recognized this impending outcome that the Constitution had facilitated.”
So, it comes as no surprise that, as “a 2020 Pew Research study found a month before the presidential election, roughly eight in ten registered voters in both camps said their political disagreements with others were about core American values, with roughly nine in ten — liberal and conservative — worried [that] a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States” [emphasis added]. We are now in a situation in which tribe is pitted against tribe, race against race, rich against poor, red against blue states.
We have succumbed to the “termites of self-loathing,” to use a term coined by Ben Stein. There is hardly a historic personage — Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Columbus, St Junípero Serra — who is not vilified, “cancelled,” and banished into outer darkness by woke activists and educators. One should be grateful that at least Frederick Douglass and Dr Martin Luther King Jr are spared such treatment, given their devotion to American ideals in the Declaration of Independence, classical literature, and Scripture. They are just ignored.
Dearth of patriotism
Recently, a friend whose daughter attended one of the tonier prep schools in Washington, DC, related that his conversations with her on US and Western history were disappointing. She, and her friends, showed no “piety” toward her country or heritage.
It was an interesting word choice and recalled my own school days studying Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem written between 29 and 19 BC. It tells the story of the Trojan Aeneas, who fled the destruction of his city, travelled to Italy, and would later become the ancestor of the Romans.
I remember my Jesuit instructor lauding “pius Aeneas,” “pious” being the most used adjective throughout the poem. In following the will of the gods — he even left the captivating Dido in Carthage — Aeneas demonstrated pietas, a virtue in the eyes of Virgil and my teacher, in his devotion to family, country, and mission. Such piety is no longer encouraged in our educational institutions, or so it would seem.
Major culprit
What brought America to this sorry state? In the beginning there was the “Original Zinn” — Howard Zinn, that is, a Boston University professor of political science and “the godfather of the radical attack on America’s history”, as Goeglein outlines in a pivotal chapter of Toward a More Perfect Union.
Zinn’s “epic screed,” A People’s History of the United States (1980), and his supplemental book for high schoolers, A Young People’s History of the United States (2007), have had an unparalleled impact on social studies teachers. The historian “refram[ed]” and “reimagin[ed]” facts to fit a Marxist critique of the US and a Western civilisation marred, claimed Zinn, “by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money.” For Zinn, “standards of historical analysis are merely ‘technical problems’ to be dismissed.”
“You wanna read a real history book?” Matt Damon’s titular character, Will, asks Robin Williams’ Dr Sean Maguire in the movie Good Will Hunting (1997). “Read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f***ing knock you on your ass.” Indeed, it does. It also boggles the mind.
Zinn claims that the nation “has been taken over by men [the founders] who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties.” Again, in service to ideology, Zinn does not believe in objective history as documented by Mary Grabar, PhD, a refugee of communist Yugoslavia, on whom Goeglein draws heavily.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the main author of the 1619 Project, backtracked after respected historians critiqued her work. She claimed that the project was not about history but about “memory.” This is not historically grounded memory, but memory saturated with ideology and politics. This is pure Zinn in methodology. Hence, noted historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Eugene Genovese, and Michael Kammen — hardly a crowd of right-wingers — criticised Zinn as a “polemicist, not a historian.”
“His ultimate goal is not a historical one but a political one,” writes Goeglein. “[H]e wanted to depict the United States as an illegitimate enterprise, one demanding a revolution.”
Pushback
According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, today, only 18 percent of colleges require that students take a US history or government class to graduate. Maybe that is a blessing, given what passes for “history” in today’s woke environment. Ultimately, however, this is devastating to national unity.
Goeglein describes survey after survey that all indicate Americans’ ignorance of their rights under law and history. When the Constitution is taught, it is derided as being not radical enough in terms of the outcomes desired by left-of-centre teachers and advocates.
Toward A More Perfect Union does not specify a political agenda for reform, although it does note efforts made by some governors to reign in educational bureaucracies on, say, critical race theory. It does make a plea for parents to make a concerted effort to teach and counsel their children on the history of the nation and to pay close attention to what their schools are teaching.
It points to excellent resources available with which parents can educate themselves and their children on the complete story of American exceptionalism, not excluding the darker chapters. Parents who can afford the cost should look for alternatives to public schools that sacrifice true learning for the sake of ideology. “Classical” schools, home schooling, and parochial schools — all of which boomed during the COVID lockdowns — are possible options.
Parents who cannot afford private schools or who have special-needs children “must be extra vigilant and expect to receive the full wrath of Leftist activists if they stand up and demand that civics be taught while also standing against the indoctrination their children are receiving.” Specifically, they need to insist on the rights to inspect curricula, to opt out of the teaching of certain subjects, and to insist that controversial issues be discussed impartially. No easy tasks these.
Goeglein concludes:
[W]e must rededicate ourselves to the teaching of history — true, verifiable, factual history, with all its glories and tragedies. We need not fear to teach the ugly truths about America alongside the beautiful ones, because America’s founding vision is pure and her ideals are noble. Our failures do not change that.
Toward a More Perfect Union makes a compelling case that the country’s future, as one nation, demands a reclamation of our educational system and a recovery of the authentic teaching of history and constitutional government rightly understood.
G. Tracy Mehan, III, was Assistant Administrator for Water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the Administration of President George W. Bush. He is an adjunct professor at Scalia Law School,… More by G. Tracy Mehan III
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Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his plan to overhaul the ideological education system at New College of Florida (NCF) and restore its original mission.
DeSantis will appoint six new members of NCF’s board of trustees: activist Chris Rufo, Dr. Mark Bauerlein, Dr. Matthew Spalding, Dr. Charles Kesler, lawyer Debra Jenks and educator Jason “Eddie” Speir. The Florida Board of Governors will also appoint a seventh member.
The 13-member board now has enough members to reshape the public college’s ideological courses and campus environment.
“As Governor DeSantis stated in his second inaugural speech: ‘We must ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth.’ Starting today, the ship is turning around. New College of Florida, under the governor’s new appointees, will be refocused on its founding mission of providing a world-class quality education with an exceptional focus on the classics,” Bryan Griffin, the press secretary for DeSantis, said in a statement.
NCF currently lists among its values “a just, diverse, equitable and inclusive community,” echoing the progressive ideology of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), better known as critical race theory. The school is “actively working toward eliminating outcome disparities for underrepresented and underserved groups,” it says in its values section.
“It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South,” James Uthmeier, Chief of Staff for DeSantis said.
The school provides certain services, like its Office of Inclusive Excellence, a gender studies program and its Gender and Diversity Center. It celebrates “latinx” history month through films, workshops, concerts and lectures, its website says.
NCF’s Office of Inclusive Excellence, the DEI office on campus, documents “outcomes and learnings from Phase I of the Inclusive Campus Climate initiative” and develops “campus-wide DEI key metrics and milestones, and support departmental implementation,” according to its page.
The NCF gender studies program offers courses in queer studies, queer history and feminist philosophy as part of its curriculum. It lists “community relations and organizing” among its potential career paths.
It also provides students with “gender identity affirmation resources” to assist students with legal name changes and updating their pronouns, according to a resource form.
In 2001, the Florida legislature separated NCF from the University of South Florida (USF) system and outlined a mission “combining educational innovation with educational excellence,” and to “provide a quality education to students of high ability who, because of their ability, deserve a program of study that is both demanding and stimulating.”
“We must ensure school systems are responsive to parents and to students, not partisan interest groups, and we must ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth, not the imposition of trendy ideology,” DeSantis said
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Secularisation is decimating the world’s largest faith group.
We live in precarious times. The world is changing in ways we could not fathom a short forty years ago. Believing Christians, pro-family advocates and patriotic folks are fast becoming today’s marginalised communities.
For centuries the West, aka “Western Christendom”, was a dynamic and expanding enterprise that by the late 1800s effectively ruled the world. Even when warring among themselves, Westerners did their utmost to spread the faith. The world has been tremendously enriched by missions, schools, clinics and much else founded in the spirit of Christianity.
Today that is a flagging spirit, something painfully obvious. Two recent batches of demographic data seem to bear that out.
Replacement
The first came from the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS), reporting that only 42.6% of people in England and Wales identify as Christian. The UK Telegraphheadline summed it up:
“Christians now a minority in England and Wales for first time”
ONS reports that in 2001, 72% of people in England and Wales identified as Christian. Those identifying as “no religion” increased from 15% in 2001 to 37.2% in 2021. In the last decade self-identified Muslims rose by almost a third to 6.5%. For the same period, Hindus realised a 13% increase, rising to 1.7%.
Interestingly, self-identified Muslims are more religious than Christians. More people attend mosque every week in the UK than attend church. It has been that way for a while. According to a Christian Research study from twenty years ago:
51 per cent of the Muslims quizzed in the 2001 census said they prayed every day, compared to just 6.3 per cent of Christians who attend church services each week.
A 2005 Christian Research study, “The Future of the Church”, predicted that the number of Muslims attending mosque every week would double that of Christians attending church by 2040, forecasting:
[T]he number of Christians attending Sunday service could see a two-thirds drop over the next three decades. The current 9.4 per cent of the population currently in regular attendance at Sunday service is expected to be under 5 per cent by 2040.
The UK is well on the way to meeting that forecast.
Secularisation
The second batch of troublesome data is the Pew Research Center’s study, “Modeling the Future of Religion in America”. Their findings are that Americans are leaving Christianity in droves and identifying as “atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular.’”
[I]n 2020, about 64% of Americans, including children, were Christian. People who are religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called religious “nones,” accounted for 30% of the U.S. population. Adherents of all other religions — including Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists — totaled about 6%.
[P]rojections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, “nones” would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population.
The same trend is found throughout the Anglosphere, Europe and even Latin America. Is the Christian Era coming to a close?
Consider: For the sake of “religious neutrality,” the Christian calendar devised 1500 years ago by Dionysius Exiguus, denominating history per the Incarnation, used B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini) for dating history. That practice has been abandoned for BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). While doing so may well be more “inclusive”, it nonetheless attests to the diminishing influence of Christianity. This is just one of modernity’s thousand cuts.
While religious transition is usually a lengthy process — consider the Great Schism, the Renaissance and Reformation — the twentieth century vastly accelerated secularisation of the West. Depleted and demoralised by two world wars, quickly followed by unprecedented affluence and lightning technological progress, the West saw mammon thoroughly triumph by the 1960s, when religious expression was banned from the public square in America.
Sobering consequences
With secularism comes moral relativism, where there are no absolutes. Rather, all is relative, situational and governed by feeling rather than thinking. In fact, those steadfastly standing by absolutes are often the object of chattering class derision. Despite the proliferation of “Pride” festivals throughout the West, today any public declaration of pride in being Christian, Western or White can be a career-terminator.
Along with mammon-worshiping secularism, there has been, worldwide, a 50% decline in fertility in 50 years. This is most acute in the Global North countries and is leading to unsustainable economic and social conditions. Little wonder that governments in the West and elsewhere are doing backflips to boost birthrates. Nothing like the Biblical injunction “be fruitful and multiply” is to be found in globalism, mammon-worship or whatever label that comports with modernism/secularism.
In fact, the fanatical zeal of acolytes of the secular religion, aka “wokeism”, is comparable to that of the early Bolshevik regime. Just note the ostracising, cancelling and complete intolerance of those with whom they disagree. And these folks are in power in most of the West. If you have any doubt, remember your history: as a friend recently reminded me, statues are pulled down and place names are changed after revolutions.
It is long past time that people of faith, the family-friendly and the patriotic types trying to preserve their respective historical nations cease quibbling among themselves and circle the wagons. Yes, the best defence is offence, but we need to consolidate our position first. That is called building community.
Remember that appeasement doesn’t work. Virtue signalling and sacrificing kindred spirits to persuade your enemies that you’re not racist, bigoted, homophobic, etc., are just bending the knee to the bad guys. They validate the regime. That doesn’t build community and solidarity. As the folks say down home, don’t feed the alligator, hoping to be eaten last.
Louis T. March has a background in government, business and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family… More by Louis T. March
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Cancel culture is so out of control that its worst purveyors are now cancelling themselves.
Proving that irony can indeed be delicious, this week thousands of PayPal customers closed their accounts after the payment platform threatened to fine users thousands of dollars for promoting “misinformation”.
The bizarre policy update was recently announced by PayPal. It deemed “the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials” that “promote misinformation” or “present a risk to user safety or wellbeing” as a prohibited activity under its Accepted Use Policy.
The policy update—since revoked by PayPal—would have allowed the company to sanction its customers with fines of up to $2,500 per offence. The update had also threatened fines for “the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory”. Decisions would have been made at PayPal’s sole discretion.
The Daily Wire broke the story about PayPal’s latest woke sellout over the weekend, prompting thousands of social media users to mock the company, call for boycotts, and announce the closure of their PayPal accounts.
Many compared it to the social credit system used by the Chinese Communist Party to suppress its citizens’ dissent. Others warned that Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), currently under trial in many Western nations, could soon be weaponised in the same way.
Elon Musk, who created PayPal’s forerunner X.com was one of many upset. In response to former PayPal president David Marcus’ tweet, “A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity,” Musk gave a terse reply: “Agreed.”
It’s hard for me to openly criticize a company I used to love and gave so much to. But @PayPal’s new AUP goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity. https://t.co/Gzf8faChUb
PayPal has since reversed course, claiming that the update went out “in error”.
“An [Accepted Use Policy] notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information,” a PayPal spokesperson told the Daily Wire. “PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy. We’re sorry for the confusion this has caused.”
Not everyone found the apology convincing, with PayPal facing a second wave of social media backlash.
“Why would PayPal have written out the terms for taking $2500 from people who spread ‘misinformation’ if they weren’t going to implement it at some point,” conservative activist Ryan Fournier mused. “You don’t just have copy sitting around like that for no reason. This was no mistake.”
“PayPal isn’t sorry, they’re just mad they got caught,” tweeted actor Kevin Sorbo.
“So the PayPal $2,500 misinformation fine was misinformation? Does that mean they owe us $2,500? #BankruptPaypal,” another one Twitter user quipped.
PayPal’s share price plummeted by over 6 percent following news of its woke policy somersault.
This is not PayPal’s first venture into the world of wokeness.
Last April, it cut ties with evolutionary biologist Colin Wright for his belief that biological sex is real, there are only two sexes, and the differences between males and females matter. Wright had relied on PayPal to receive payments from subscribers to his Substack page.
“You can no longer do business with PayPal,” an out-of-the-blue email informed Wright, after trans activists had dobbed on him. “After a review, we decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change to your business model or your business was considered risky.”
Wright’s PayPal account has been locked ever since and his money is inaccessible.
Other users banned from PayPal include conservative commentator Ian Miles Cheong; Toby Young, editor of both the UK-based Daily Sceptic and the Free Speech Union; and the newly founded gay rights organisation Gays Against Groomers.
Whether the boycott against PayPal has sent a strong enough message to banks and payment platforms remains to be seen.
What’s certain is that a tide of sanity is rising around the West. Swarms of ordinary citizens do not consent to being fined for believing fundamental facts of the universe that were taken for granted until five minutes ago.
Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg
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Justice Clarence Thomas, being African American, is seen as a traitor to the woke cause.
After the overturning of Roe v Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas has been a particular target of venomous attack from the woke mob. Why do they hate him so much? One might be forgiven for thinking that it is due to his staunch anti-abortion views. But that explanation does not work.
Pope Francis has long expressed that opposing abortion is “closely linked to the defense of each and every other human right”, and yet, the Left is not obsessed with him (in fact, many even take a liking). At some point, even Joe Biden supported letting States overturn Roe v Wade, and again, the Left did not go ballistic on him.
Not behaving as expected
So, why the animus against Thomas? There can only be one explanation: race. In 1991, as he was accused of sexually harassing Anita Hill, Thomas countered that he was the victim of “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you.”
This was loose talk, as it trivialised the suffering of real lynching victims in America’s troubled history of race relations. But Thomas did have a point in arguing that in the United States, any black person who dares to deviate from the official narrative of how blacks are supposed to act, will face severe harassment.
In 1991, he anticipated a trend that would become mainstream in our times: if you are born with a particular skin colour, you are supposed to behave in a certain way, and uphold a specific ideology. If not, you are a race traitor. As Biden so neatly phrased it:
“[I]f you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
Any competent scholar of the history of racism would immediately recognise this as race essentialism. As Angelo Corlett explains in his book Race, Racism and Reparations,
“proponents of race essentialism define human races by a set of genetic or cultural traits shared by all members of a ‘racial’ group.”
Who are the neo-Nazis now?
In the first half of the 20th Century, this view was popular amongst proponents of so-called “racial science”. They believed that racial biological traits determine how people behave. Hitler believed that no matter how much a person with Jewish ancestry tried to assimilate to German society (even converting to another religion), he or she would still be a dangerous Jew, because it was in his or her essence.
Race essentialism is abhorrent, and one might think that after 1945, the world learned a lesson. And yet, race essentialism is alive and kicking, but this time, under the guise of woke progressivism. As per today’s woke rules, if you are black, you must embrace the whole woke mindset.
White people (such as Pope Francis) may occasionally be forgiven for having anti-abortion views, but if you are black and you deviate from the woke line (such as Clarence Thomas), you are a race traitor, an Uncle Tom. Unsurprisingly, Thomas has been called “Uncle Clarence” multiple times.
If you are black, not only do you have to act a certain way, but you must also have a special sexual preference. The woke pay lip service to interracial relationships, but amongst them there is a sense of unease when they contemplate a successful black man marrying a white woman.
For example, when Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States, USA Today columnist Barbara Reynolds wrote: “Here’s a man who’s going to decide crucial issues for the country and he has already said no to blacks; he has already said if he can’t paint himself white he’ll think white and marry a white woman.” Russell Adams, chairman of African American studies at Howard University, said that Thomas “marrying a white woman is a sign of his rejection of the black community.”
Truly racist
Frantz Fanon is a figure beloved by the Left. In 1952, he published Black Skin, White Masks, a canonical text of wokeness. In that book, he also scorns black men who fall in love with white women. Fanon castigates himself for, at some point, having had these thoughts: “Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white… I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.” The implication of this passage is that loving a white woman is an act of racial treason.
Fanon felt disdain for black people who embraced Western values. He claimed they were wearing white masks, as if somehow, they were deviating from their real essence, and were therefore living an inauthentic life. Therefore — so Fanon believed — Western civilisation must be rejected entirely. As he explained in The Wretched of the Earth, “When the colonized hear a speech on Western culture, they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close to hand.” He who admires Western values is a sellout.
Ever since Fanon, racial essentialism in the name of progress has only grown worse. People of color are now encouraged not to honour punctuality, because being on time is part of whiteness. Black kids who are academically talented run the risk of being told they are “acting white”. Analysing things objectively is an act of white supremacy. And so on.
Consequently, Clarence Thomas is not allowed to have anti-abortion views. Nobody cares about his anti-abortion arguments, because he is not supposed to make them in the first place. Other jurists, philosophers or theologians will be allowed to oppose abortion, but only if they are white. Thomas is hated not because of his views, but because of his skin colour. He upsets the arbitrary racial classifications that the woke are so eager to embrace.
As per woke taxonomy, black people cannot be conservative, and if they are, they are only wearing a “white mask”. To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens, “identity politics poisons everything”. We can no longer have a meaningful discussion about anything as vital as the ontological status of a fetus, because the race of the discussants will determine who is allowed to uphold a particular view. It’s time to push back against this madness.
Gabriel Andrade is a university professor originally from Venezuela. He writes about politics, philosophy, history, religion and psychology. More by Gabriel Andrade
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Parents need Courage, Clarity, Compassion, and Communication to dialogue effectively with their children.
In recent weeks, the following incidents took place, all involving people I know personally who live near me.
A middle-schooler was unable to focus at school where a female student who identifies as a boy identifying as a dog kept barking in class. The teacher refused to say anything about it.
A girl refused to use the school washroom all day because she didn’t want to use the gender-neutral washroom with boys. Using the girls-only washroom, which is out of the way, would single her out among her peers.
A mother was baffled when her teen started spouting words like “colonialism” and “patriarchy” while dressing down her father for not clearing his plate from the table.
A grad-year student looking into post-secondary options found the first required course for the local college’s fine arts program is “Intro to Critical and Cultural Theory,” a Marxist-based philosophy that subtly encourages aggression and division.
An elementary student borrowed a library graphic novel of Little Women in which Jo comes out as a lesbian and shares a kiss with another girl.
A Catholic high school teacher asked students to introduce themselves using their preferred pronouns.
Examples of wokeism are also taking place in the workforce:
A new employee taking diversity/inclusivity training was required to answer Yes to the question, “Does refusing to use a person’s preferred pronouns constitute harassment?”
A hairdresser had two customers an hour apart tell her how they “can’t say anything” in the face of woke ideology such as these scenarios. They feel as if their opinions have been nullified.
Then there was an employee who decided to speak out after being required to attend a training session to make the organization more LGBT2SQ-friendly. She wrote a direct and charitable letter to her employer explaining her beliefs. The employer decided to make the training optional.
How radically different my childhood was compared to today’s, when words like colonialism, patriarchy, transgenderism, critical (race) theory, intersectionality, white privilege, and social justice are seeping into my home and into society’s everyday vocabulary. Along with these ideas comes a climate of anger and division. Ironically, all facets of woke ideology instil a victim mentality which ultimately disempowers its adherents.
Hence the anger.
Adding to the confusion is the fact that many woke “values” piggyback on Christian virtues. As Christians, we also want to put an end to racism and injustice. The difference is that in the woke framework there is no mercy, no forgiveness, and no hope.
It has taken me a while to understand the movement.
I started meeting monthly online with a group of moms to discuss the origins and issues facing our children. We studied Noelle Mering, a podcaster and the author of a new book Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology. We examined Catholic Voices resources and invited Peter Nation to present several talks. Having a clear picture of the historical facts behind the movement has helped us in our discussions with family and friends.
Mering exhorts us to have Courage, Clarity, and Compassion: courage for effecting change; clarity for understanding issues in order to dialogue; and compassion for everyone regardless of whether they are a woke fellow traveller or a woke ideologue.
For parents, I would add a fourth “C” – communication. This should be at the forefront of our minds at all times. A river can’t flow if it is blocked.
The teen years present a bigger challenge, so parents have to get creative. Even if a teen is intractable, flowers secretly placed on her desk, extra Rosaries prayed, and perseverance in saying, “Good night, honey” to someone who only grunts can soften the heart for eventual conversation. We work on what we can work on today.
Woke ideology particularly disdains three aspects of Christianity: that we need to forgive; that we need to be open to dialogue; and that we are children of God. Focusing on these positives will instil in children a love for the beauty and truth of the Christian faith.
Forgiving others and being forgiven produces a tangible peace that children easily recognize. This can be fostered in daily interactions and, importantly, for Catholics, in regular confession.
Teaching our children to dialogue with others who hold different views fosters self-confidence and contributes to a healthy society. Even our worst enemies have some good points. Similarly, we can relate to someone with woke values in many ways: all people are equal, whether white or black, woman or man. This can be a foundation to start a dialogue.
We can guide our children in learning about opposite viewpoints, figuring out how each perspective is different and which is most consistent with facts and logic.
Additionally, they need to see that regular dialogue with God is necessary to thrive in this life. For a Christian, the core of personal identity is the fact that we are sons and daughters of God. It is not the colour of our skin, our sex, our gender, our ethnic background, or our nationality. Children are amazed when they realize God planned on creating them specifically, with all their quirks and qualities, before the beginning of time.
These approaches, along with Mering’s constant advice to “have fun in the family,” constitute an effective inoculation against many harmful influences.
Parallel to the internal guidance of our children is keeping an eye on external factors.
Pay attention to what goes on in school. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson recommends that children whose teachers rely upon words like equity, diversity, inclusivity, white privilege leave the classroom. Why should they be indoctrinated with “radical leftist, neo-Marxist ideology”?
Erroneous ideas often come more from peers than teachers, so getting to know your children’s friends is important. Pay attention to their internet habits. Invest in a parental control or filtering device.
Read books and watch shows together that support your values. There’s a wealth of information available in an entertaining form on the internet – on topics ranging from preferred pronouns to same-sex attraction to social justice.
Helping children to remain loyal to noble human and Christian values has always been a challenge for parents. Imagine what it must have been like to be a parent in Nazi Germany when children were being courted by Hitler Youth groups, or in in the Soviet Union, when everyone was expected to join the Young Pioneers. Love your children, educate them, and entrust them to the Lord. He will open their eyes to the truth.
Ida Gazzola is the mother of 6 girls and one boy and lives in British Columbia, Canada. Before embarking on the adventure of parenting, she studied and worked in the financial industry. Team Baby: Creating… More by Ida Gazzola
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Only seven percent of journalists in the United States’ national media scene identify as conservatives or libertarians.
Why do so many experts seem to be so very wrong, so often? This is the curious question recently posed by a contrarian American political scientist at Kentucky State University, Wilfred Reilly. His catalogue of things the experts got wrong, featuredin a recent article in the online magazine Spiked, is an impressive one.
On just the narrow topic of hate crime hoaxes, Reilly’s list includes Jussie Smollett, the Covington Catholic boys, Kyle Rittenhouse, Erica Thomas, Michael Brown, and Jacob Blake.
In each of these instances, the chattering class — whether in media, politics or academia — had us believing the precise opposite of what turned out to be true.
Another list provided by Reilly concerned longer term, larger scale calamities that failed to materialise: “global cooling, Y2K, peak oil, prevalent acid rain, the predictions and tables in ThePopulation Bomb and An Inconvenient Truth, and so on.”
Reilly observes that this phenomenon is not new — that thinkers as far back as Socrates saw that “set-in-their-ways ideological monocultures are more likely than other groups of smart people to be grievously wrong.”
Warns Reilly, “such monocultures exist to a truly remarkable extent across mass media and academia in the contemporary US.” The statistics couldn’t be clearer on this.
Only seven percent of journalists in the United States’ national media scene identify as conservatives or libertarians, according to a major 2004 poll from Pew cited by Reilly. Only but the most ideologically entrenched would deny that American newsrooms are now crowded with liberal coastal elites who live in a different world from most of their readers.
Moreover, a study conducted a year later found that among academic sociologists, 59 per cent are loyal Democrats, 41 percent are independents or support a minor party, and zero per cent are Republicans. If this was true in the 2000s, one can only imagine what wokeness has done to academic fields like sociology.
Reilly laments that “one of the most intimidating things about being a ‘heterodox’ thinker is having to constantly say that ‘the experts’ are wrong”. While often appearing as just another form of hubris to outside observers, heterodoxy creates its own cascade of introspective doubts: “How can all of these very intelligent people be wrong? Surely it must be me who is wrong instead?”
And yet wrong “the experts” so often are — and at what seems to be an accelerating pace.
Consider gender ideology. Even if we grant the rather contested notion that a person’s biological sex can be wholly separate from their gender identity — what Reilly describes as “how masculine or feminine you feel in the context of current social norms” — the groupthink of the expert class still makes little sense.
“Road races are run not by people’s souls but by their bodies,” writes Reilly, “and there seems to be no logical reason for adult male-bodied people to ever compete in the women’s division.”
Indeed, if gender identity and biological sex form some kind of hardware-software relationship — if a person can truly be “trapped in the wrong body” — would it not make more sense to edit the “software”, rather than update the “hardware” through very costly, sometimes gory, and always irreversible procedures? And once those procedures are complete, what of every chromosome in every cell in that body that still testifies to the truth? Must they be censored, too?
Or take systemic racism. Among its central claims are that America and other Western societies are defined by white privilege, maintained by an apparatus of white supremacy, and protected for the sake of white fragility. And yet as Reilly – who is black — observes, “six or seven of the 10 most financially successful ethnic groups in present-day America are not white”. Talk about inconvenient truths.
The dogma that any gap in performance between racial groups must be due to racism is easy enough to grasp. But it is also a naked logical fallacy, known as “begging the question” — a circular argument in which the conclusion is included in the premise.
Similar to someone adamantly claiming that their watermelon was blue on the inside until the skin was pierced and the flesh turned red, no proof could ever be mustered to convince systemic racism enthusiasts that they have it wrong.
In fact, the watermelon illustration fits neatly with Wilfred Reilly’s diagnosis of the problem we face. How can so many experts can be wrong and not see it? Why are so few willing to testify that the emperor has no clothes? Reilly explains:
“My thesis: most truly bizarre theories arise when smart people adopt a premise that sounds plausible, even if it is factually incorrect, due to factors like peer-group pressure, and then reason forward correctly from that premise.”
Give me a dozen explanations for how piercing the skin of a watermelon could change the colour of the flesh inside, and you might gain an intellectual following. Convince me that my own vision or faulty perception is to blame for the watermelon changing colour, and I may even be convinced.
But that doesn’t mean your watermelon actually turned from blue to pink — and it certainly doesn’t mean the masses should be demonised for questioning the idea that watermelons change colour. “Premises, like facts and like ‘lives’ of various kinds, matter,” Reilly declares. And his solution:
“If an apparently intelligent person says something to you that seems basically insane, ask them how they got there and what their underlying worldview is. Listen well and sincerely to their response. But remember – if you reject their starting premise for logical reasons, it really doesn’t matter how many credentialed people parrot the conclusions that follow from it: they are still wrong.”
Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - A Compass for Common Sensehttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - A Compass for Common Sense2022-04-20 05:04:582022-04-20 05:05:44Why do so many ‘experts’ screw things up so often?
Only time will tell if Rogan’s critics have the last laugh and see him gone completely.
Comedian Joe Rogan is the biggest name in podcasting. His show, the Joe Rogan Experience, attracts an estimated 11 million listeners per episode. Since 2020, Spotify has enjoyed an exclusive deal with JRE for an estimated US$100 million. With three to four episodes per week, each of which run for hours at a time, he has a lot of influence — and a lot to lose.
And don’t his detractors know it!
“I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” Neil Young wrote to his management team and record label last week. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.” Spotify sided with Rogan — and then removed Young’s catalogue from their service.
Young’s decision followed the release of an open letter, penned by a 270-strong “coalition of scientists, medical professionals, professors, and science communicators,” who called Rogan out for “misinformation” and “promoting baseless conspiracy theories”. They were particularly referring to his recent interviews with Drs Robert Malone and Peter McCullough.
(As it turns out, fewer than 100 of the signees were medical doctors, most of whom work at universities and do not practice medicine. The remainder included teachers, psychologists, engineers, podcasters, a dentist, and a vet.)
Others have since followed the lead of Rogan’s frontrunner critics. Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell soon announced she would remove her music from Spotify, followed by guitarist Nils Lofgren.
According to the Los Angeles Times, there are rumours that the Foo Fighters, Barry Manilow, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle “will be the next to walk”. Indeed, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex released a statement denouncing a “global misinformation crisis” and telling of their heroic efforts to hold Spotify accountable.
More recently, even the White House has urged Spotify to tighten the screws of censorship, first amendment be damned.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki calls on Spotify, a Swedish company, to do more to censor Joe Rogan, an American citizen, with regard to COVID.
While Joe Rogan is a giant, he is certainly not uncancellable. And Spotify is no charitable organisation. Shareholders and company executives factor profits into any major decision — which may be why Spotify has already quietly cancelled over 40 past JRE episodes. They have also announced their decision to add a content advisory label to any podcasts that discuss Covid-19.
It may not end there. Only time will tell if Rogan’s critics have the last laugh and see him gone completely.
Just what is so threatening about this former UFC commentator and psychedelics enthusiast?
Decorated journalist Glenn Greenwald — whose centre-left libertarian outlook closely aligns with Rogan’s — minces no words on the controversy:
“Censorship — once the province of the American Right during the heyday of the Moral Majority of the 1980s — now occurs in isolated instances in that faction. In modern-day American liberalism, however, censorship is a virtual religion. They simply cannot abide the idea that anyone who thinks differently or sees the world differently than they should be heard.“
Warns Greenwald: the woke’s focus until recently was to “expand and distort the concept of ‘hate speech’ to mean ‘views that make us uncomfortable,’ and then demand that such ‘hateful’ views be prohibited on that basis.” Now, he says, their target is “misinformation” or “disinformation” — terms that “have no clear or concise meaning”. And the lack of definition is deliberate. “Like the term ‘terrorism,’ it is their elasticity that makes them so useful,” he writes.
“Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation,” Greenwald notes, “and, because of that, do so routinely.”
It’s not Rogan’s alleged “misinformation” that worries these outlets. It’s their loss of control over the narrative being believed by the masses. They too have much to lose — and they are losing. Rogan’s stats dwarf the viewership of America’s popular cable news channels, even in primetime.
For further proof that “misinformation” is not Joe Rogan’s crime, consider that Neil Young previously released an entire album, The Monsanto Years (2015), which sowed major popular distrust towards genetically modified cropping.
Young released a short anti-GMO documentary, and he went on tour “amplifying misinformation about GMOs to large mainstream audiences”. He was also interviewed by Steven Colbert on The Late Show, where he warned of “the terrible diseases and all of the things that are happening” to people who eat genetically modified products.
To Joe Rogan’s credit, he released a nine-minute video via Spotify in which he graciously addresses his critics, admits various failings, and clarifies that he is no expert but enjoys hearing from experts across the ideological divide. His message would disarm all but the most dedicated censorship enthusiasts.
In the video, Rogan addresses the hot potato that is ‘misinformation’, and makes a good case for why his show deserves to stay up:
“The problem I have with the term ‘misinformation’ — especially today — is that many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact.
“Like for instance, eight months ago if you said, ‘If you get vaccinated you can still catch covid and you can still spread covid,’ you would be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now, that’s accepted as fact.
“If you said, ‘I don’t think cloth masks work,’ you would be banned from social media. Now that’s openly and repeatedly stated on CNN.
“If you said, ‘I think it’s possible that Covid-19 came from a lab,’ you would be banned from many social media platforms. Now that’s on the cover of Newsweek.”
Precisely. “Misinformation” is whatever the cultural imperialists decide it is at any given moment, until they change their mind or the truth catches up with them.
Rather than censoring him, Rogan’s critics would do well to listen to his podcast. By doing so, they may even learn what their future opinions will be.
Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg
RELATED TWEET:
After I was beaten by antifa & hospitalized for a brain bleed in 2019, @joerogan offered to give me a voice even though I was unknown. The pile on against him now is because he’s willing to speak with those overlooked by the establishment. Thank you, Joe. https://t.co/oqaSvrbgWfpic.twitter.com/uKfcrbcBbu
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - A Compass for Common Sensehttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - A Compass for Common Sense2022-02-04 05:53:452022-02-04 07:31:39The Joe Rogan affair is not about ‘misinformation’ but narrative control
Elon Musk dropped the mic on the woke mob with some powerful comments.
“Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool,” Musk said. He immediately followed it up with, “I mean, Chappelle, like, what the f**k? Trying to shut down Chappelle? Come on, man. That’s crazy. So, do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate, basically?
During an interview with the Babylon Bee, the founder of Tesla and arguably the most interesting man on the planet argued that wokeness is a disease looking to kill comedy.
You can watch his comments in the clip below.
Elon Musk @elonmusk: "Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool … Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation, and hate?" pic.twitter.com/2LYCaXAp5A
For those of you interested in watching his entire interview with the Babylon Bee, you can fire that up below.
As I’ve said before, with every single person who joins the anti-woke and anti-cancel culture movement, the closer we get to winning the war.
There are already some big names who have spoken out, includingAaron Rodgers, Charles Barkley and Joe Rogan. However, Elon Musk is the biggest of them all.
He’s the richest man on the planet, and he has the kind of influence that could start legit wars. That’s what happens when you’re worth $278 billion.
Cancel culture is a cancer on society, and people must fight back.
You gain nothing by bending the knee to the woke mob. Stand up and resist this garbage so that we can end cancel culture once and for all. pic.twitter.com/hjkMsSRX3f
Now, he’s using his influence to remind people that it’s okay to laugh, tell jokes, enjoy comedy and to remind people that the woke mob should be ignored at all costs.
Members of the woke mob and people who support cancel culture are bitter losers who haven’t accomplished anything in life. Instead of trying to create interesting things and elevate people, they like dragging people down to their level. It’s not a big mystery what’s going on.
The woke mob's main goal is to cancel everyone with a platform. Why?
Once guys like me and others who hate cancel culture are out of the way, it makes attacking regular Americans much easier.
Props to Musk for keeping it real and being honest about the goals of people who are woke. Again, with every person who speaks up, we become one step closer to ending this nonsense forever.
An American academic at a progressive university outlines his strategies for overturning the woke juggernaut.
I’m a professor of engineering at a large progressive university. I’ve written and just released a short book with James Lindsay called Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond. I’ve written it to help academics who believe in traditional liberal values to counter and overturn the Woke juggernaut at whatever level of academic machinery they can.
For over a decade I watched as my department, faculty, university, and funding agencies were overtaken by the Critical Social Justice, or Woke, perspective. I began consciously working against the perspective six years ago.
Since that time, I have observed the strategies and techniques used by the Woke to advance their agenda. I have also tested strategies and techniques to thwart their advances, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, sometimes alone and sometimes with like-minded allies.
By 2019 I came to appreciate the degree to which the Woke juggernaut had consolidated its power over the academy, and this forced me into a different level of action.
I devoted enormous resources to researching the CSJ perspective and its historical and philosophical antecedents. I was especially interested in documentation on how the perspective could be challenged. Unfortunately, I came up empty-handed with respect to the latter and felt compelled to share what I had learned.
As a result, I began blogging every week for six months with the intention of compiling the blog posts into a book—the book that became Counter Wokecraft.
The book is designed for readers who recognize that there is a problem in their university but who don’t understand what that problem is, or what to do about it. As such, the first part of the book serves as primer on the Woke perspective. It simply and clearly explains the Woke worldview with a focus on the Woke ethos (overturn and replace the traditional liberal view of the university) and political project (the retributive redistribution of resources from “oppressor” to “oppressed” identities—or equity).
An important implication of the Woke ethos is a fervent belief in activism as a central role for academics, as well as the belief that the ends justify the means when seeking to advance Woke goals. This section also describes the different types of participants encountered in university environments, from the Woke to Woke Dissidents.
The second part of the book analyzes the collection of principles, strategies, and tactics used by the Woke to entrench their perspective—in other words, wokecraft.
The success of the Woke relies primarily on three things. First is the weaponization of positive-sounding, commonly understood words that have double meanings, or Woke Crossover Words. These words (e.g., critical, diversity, inclusion) are brandished like Improvised Explosive Devices. They are slipped into documents and decisions, justified by their commonly held meanings, but are later used to justify Woke interventions based on their radical Woke meaning.
Second, there is a general insistence on informality, which is then exploited to manipulate decision-making by preventing, for example, secret ballot voting.
Third, there are a number of woke bullying tactics that are used to prevent people from resisting Woke advances. These range from coercion through consensus to cancel-culture attacks. Together, these tactics are used to exaggerate support for, and quell dissent against, Woke advances. They are used to further entrench the Woke perspective in academic departments, faculties, universities, funding agencies, and governments through the Grand Tactic: Woke Viral Infection.
The crux of the last chapter is how to counter wokecraft. This involves disarming Woke tactics that quell dissent and manipulate decision-making, and thereby preventing the Woke perspective from becoming entrenched.
Essential to this whole process is recognizing who is Woke in any given situation, which is explained in the first part of the chapter. This makes it possible to identify allies and to work with them to have the largest impact. Working together involves a double-column offensive. The first column seeks to sow doubt in participants about the Woke perspective, particularly its prescriptions. The second involves amplifying and enabling dissenting opinions, while at the same time instituting the formalization of decision-making processes that allow all participants to voice their opinions.
Counter Wokecraft can surely be enriched and expanded—and perhaps someday it will be. For now, I think it is an important starting point for academics who want to take back their universities from the jaws of a caustic, anti-liberal, and anti-scientific worldview that is destroying them. I hope you will agree.
This article has been republished with permission from Minding the Campus, where it appeared on November 26.
Charles Pincourt is pseudonym for a professor of engineering at a large university. He writes about the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) perspective in universities, how it has become so successful there,… More by Charles Pincourt
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