If you click on the link you will be able to hear an in-depth analysis in a video of how Wokeness is affecting our country. Nancy
Wokeness” has become the nomenclature for the ideology or mentality of radical leftist activists on college campuses, at protests, and on social media.
But wokeness has not been limited to just a handful of activists. It’s becoming a dominant mindset in the American workplace, in both the public and private sectors, as a method to promote “anti-racism.”
A Heritage Foundation panel on July 24 addressed first what wokeness actually is, but also how it has crept into corporate boardrooms and why it’s such a problem.
Angela Sailor, vice president of The Feulner Institute at The Heritage Foundation, said that “pervasive trends under the guise of equality makes diversity training in government, and corporate America, and schools, destructive, divisive, and harmful.”
How are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn more now >>
James Lindsay, the co-author of a forthcoming book, “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody,” says wokeness is actually a combination of many different ideas.
“Wokeness is a fusion of the critical theory school of neo-Marxism, which is a form of identity politics, and radical activism that has a very particular worldview that separates the world into liberationists versus oppressors or oppressed versus oppressors,” said Lindsay, whose book is set for release Aug. 25.
It marries that, Lindsay said, with postmodern theory, which holds that “all applications of truth are actually applications of politics by other means.”
In other words, the truth is malleable, based on power and who drives the narrative of what truth really is. In effect, the truth is replaced by my truth.
Marxism is a mostly economic theory, with origins in the 19th century. Those ideas, he said, led to some of the worst atrocities in world history.
Traditional Marxist ideas were adopted but changed in the 1920s by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and others, and became the project of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. That new theory focused more on shaping culture, Lindsay said, marrying traditional Marxism with Freudian psychology and other social theories to change the way people think.
If you click on the link you will be able to hear an in-depth analysis in a video of how Wokeness is affecting our country. Nancy
Wokeness” has become the nomenclature for the ideology or mentality of radical leftist activists on college campuses, at protests, and on social media.
But wokeness has not been limited to just a handful of activists. It’s becoming a dominant mindset in the American workplace, in both the public and private sectors, as a method to promote “anti-racism.”
A Heritage Foundation panel on July 24 addressed first what wokeness actually is, but also how it has crept into corporate boardrooms and why it’s such a problem.
Angela Sailor, vice president of The Feulner Institute at The Heritage Foundation, said that “pervasive trends under the guise of equality makes diversity training in government, and corporate America, and schools, destructive, divisive, and harmful.”
How are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn more now >>
James Lindsay, the co-author of a forthcoming book, “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody,” says wokeness is actually a combination of many different ideas.
“Wokeness is a fusion of the critical theory school of neo-Marxism, which is a form of identity politics, and radical activism that has a very particular worldview that separates the world into liberationists versus oppressors or oppressed versus oppressors,” said Lindsay, whose book is set for release Aug. 25.
It marries that, Lindsay said, with postmodern theory, which holds that “all applications of truth are actually applications of politics by other means.”
In other words, the truth is malleable, based on power and who drives the narrative of what truth really is. In effect, the truth is replaced by my truth.
Marxism is a mostly economic theory, with origins in the 19th century. Those ideas, he said, led to some of the worst atrocities in world history.
Traditional Marxist ideas were adopted but changed in the 1920s by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and others, and became the project of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. That new theory focused more on shaping culture, Lindsay said, marrying traditional Marxism with Freudian psychology and other social theories to change the way people think.
The goal of postmodernists who were part of that movement was to “deconstruct the very meanings of things,” said Lindsay.
Those ideas reached a new phase with the writings of Herbert Marcuse, a Columbia University professor in the 1960s and 1970s who advocated radical activism based on identity politics.
But this radicalism burned out, Lindsay said, because its violence ultimately made it unpopular.
The radicals then left the streets and embedded themselves in our schools and universities.
“It has all of the conflict theory—separate the world into oppressor-versus-oppressed classes—with zero-sum conflict, no ability to agree or understand one another across those, and then takes on the postmodern understanding of truth being just politics by other means, which removes all of the brakes standing up against it,” Lindsay said.
Seeing the world through that lens is what constitutes wokeness.
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and author of the new book “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free,” explained how these ideas entered the workplace under the guise of combating racism and why they are so toxic.
“Anti-racism training is a con,” Gonzalez said. “These consultants get paid exorbitant amounts of money. Often these fees come from taxpayer funds.”
Though many of the advocates of wokeness are con artists, we have to take them seriously, Gonzalez said, because there is a strong ideological component to it.
“The true name of anti-racism training is consciousness-raising struggle sessions,” he said.
It’s used to demolish the “hegemonic narrative,” which in simpler terms, Gonzalez said, is simply “the American story, the American dream, the promise of liberty and prosperity that have attracted about 100 million immigrants from all over the world from 1850 to the present.”
Christopher Rufo, the director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and contributing editor at City Journal, has delved into how “anti-racist training,” together with the Black Lives Matter movement, has invaded the boardroom and government.
“This is now becoming the default ideology of the bureaucracy, and people are making, in some cases, millions of dollars offering essentially political indoctrination on the public dime to public employees,” Rufo said.
All levels of government, as well as nonprofits and corporations, now have human resources departments that have adopted critical race theory as their dominant functioning ideology, he said, adding that it’s become a particularly big problem at the federal level.
“You have an apparatus of federal power that has grown extraordinarily since the days of Woodrow Wilson through [Franklin Roosevelt] through [Lyndon Johnson] in this kind of permanently expanding power that until recently, at least theoretically, operated under the ostensible ideology of the social sciences, of neutrality, but it’s really been abandoned,” Rufo said.
The permanent bureaucracy, no matter who the president is, has adopted critical race theory as its ideology of choice.
That’s leading to a “change in regime” that has never been voted on or approved by the American people, Rufo said. The result is that the machinery of the bureaucracy will be weaponized against the American people.
Rufo spoke of potential ways to stop this form of regime change. He said that it’s important to create institutional infrastructure to protect people from being targeted and “canceled.”
Gonzalez said that it is essential to inform other Americans of the transformation taking place and warn them of the radical changes to come if these ideas are not stopped.
“The more we write about this, the more we expose people to what has taken place, to why, who did it, how they did it, and what is their real goal here, we can start to demolish this idea that ‘no, this is nice because people need … justice,’” Gonzalez said, adding: “Let’s really be honest, and without rancor in our heart, just expose them. Sunshine can be a great disinfectant. Let’s really allow in the light and expose this for what it is.”
The goal of postmodernists who were part of that movement was to “deconstruct the very meanings of things,” said Lindsay.
Those ideas reached a new phase with the writings of Herbert Marcuse, a Columbia University professor in the 1960s and 1970s who advocated radical activism based on identity politics.
But this radicalism burned out, Lindsay said, because its violence ultimately made it unpopular.
The radicals then left the streets and embedded themselves in our schools and universities.
“It has all of the conflict theory—separate the world into oppressor-versus-oppressed classes—with zero-sum conflict, no ability to agree or understand one another across those, and then takes on the postmodern understanding of truth being just politics by other means, which removes all of the brakes standing up against it,” Lindsay said.
Seeing the world through that lens is what constitutes wokeness.
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and author of the new book “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free,” explained how these ideas entered the workplace under the guise of combating racism and why they are so toxic.
“Anti-racism training is a con,” Gonzalez said. “These consultants get paid exorbitant amounts of money. Often these fees come from taxpayer funds.”
Though many of the advocates of wokeness are con artists, we have to take them seriously, Gonzalez said, because there is a strong ideological component to it.
“The true name of anti-racism training is consciousness-raising struggle sessions,” he said.
It’s used to demolish the “hegemonic narrative,” which in simpler terms, Gonzalez said, is simply “the American story, the American dream, the promise of liberty and prosperity that have attracted about 100 million immigrants from all over the world from 1850 to the present.”
Christopher Rufo, the director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and contributing editor at City Journal, has delved into how “anti-racist training,” together with the Black Lives Matter movement, has invaded the boardroom and government.
“This is now becoming the default ideology of the bureaucracy, and people are making, in some cases, millions of dollars offering essentially political indoctrination on the public dime to public employees,” Rufo said.
All levels of government, as well as nonprofits and corporations, now have human resources departments that have adopted critical race theory as their dominant functioning ideology, he said, adding that it’s become a particularly big problem at the federal level.
“You have an apparatus of federal power that has grown extraordinarily since the days of Woodrow Wilson through [Franklin Roosevelt] through [Lyndon Johnson] in this kind of permanently expanding power that until recently, at least theoretically, operated under the ostensible ideology of the social sciences, of neutrality, but it’s really been abandoned,” Rufo said.
The permanent bureaucracy, no matter who the president is, has adopted critical race theory as its ideology of choice.
That’s leading to a “change in regime” that has never been voted on or approved by the American people, Rufo said. The result is that the machinery of the bureaucracy will be weaponized against the American people.
Rufo spoke of potential ways to stop this form of regime change. He said that it’s important to create institutional infrastructure to protect people from being targeted and “canceled.”
Gonzalez said that it is essential to inform other Americans of the transformation taking place and warn them of the radical changes to come if these ideas are not stopped.
“The more we write about this, the more we expose people to what has taken place, to why, who did it, how they did it, and what is their real goal here, we can start to demolish this idea that ‘no, this is nice because people need … justice,’” Gonzalez said, adding: “Let’s really be honest, and without rancor in our heart, just expose them. Sunshine can be a great disinfectant. Let’s really allow in the light and expose this for what it is.”
We’ve been gratified this week by the outpouring of support from readers after some 280 of our Wall Street Journal colleagues signed (and someone leaked) a letter to our publisher criticizing the opinion pages. But the support has often been mixed with concern that perhaps the letter will cause us to change our principles and content. On that point, reassurance is in order.
In the spirit of collegiality, we won’t respond in kind to the letter signers. Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility in any case. The signers report to the News editors or other parts of the business, and the News and Opinion departments operate with separate staffs and editors. Both report to Publisher Almar Latour. This separation allows us to pursue stories and inform readers with independent judgment.
It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution. But we are not the New York Times. Most Journal reporters attempt to cover the news fairly and down the middle, and our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today’s media.
On Watch: Marxism & The Current Insurrection in America |
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Judicial Watch’s Director of Investigations & Research Chris Farrell joins Diana West, author of “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character” to discuss the current unrest in the nation, the political ideologies of those involved, and a brief history of Marxism in America.
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www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-revolution-is-winning/
NATIONAL REVIEW
The revolution is winning
By Andrew C. McCarthy July 18, 2020
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:
The goals of the revolution have never changed. It has simply airbrushed its terrorist leaders into prominent public scholars and “activists” with a passion for “change” and “justice.” The revolution has lots of money, organization, control of the schools, support from one of the nation’s two major political parties, and the media megaphone. That is why the revolution is winning. The 1960s never ended, they just paved the way for today.
This is what the revolution looks like.
Weather Underground terrorists, who made no secret of being anti-Ameri[c]an “small-c” communists, are having more success than they could have dreamed of in the 1960s.
They are dominating the language. You know that whole “white privilege” nostrum that we’re paying universities $60K per year to drum into our children’s brains? It is derived from their lamentation of “white skin privilege.” In their ideology, the revolution to overthrow the capitalist, racist, imperialist system summoned them — lily white radicals — to abandon their privilege and embrace the armed struggle.
Among their most influential thinkers was Bill Ayers. He got a windfall from the government’s failure to prosecute him for the bombings he carried out and the mass murders he planned but was insufficiently competent to execute. It was a second career as a “Distinguished Professor of Education” at the University of Illinois. As Sol Stern relates in a 2006 City Journal essay that should be required reading today, this entailed designing curricula used by today’s hard-Left academics, based on what Ayers saw as a moral imperative to convert schools into social-justice indoctrination labs.
It worked.
Of course, in the days before they brought the revolution into the classroom, they pursued it on urban streets, prioritizing war on cops. To the avant-garde, the police are the pointy end of the oppressive government spear, enforcing its laws and imposing the racist society’s caste system. For the revolution to succeed, the police have to be discredited, defunded, and defanged. For the Weather Underground, that meant branching into such radical offshoots as the May 19 Communist Organization and conspiring with black separatists.
If you have wondered why Islamic terror attacks have become less frequent, look no further. Muslims have been told to run for elected office where they can become influential in American politics. Also, they all run for office as Democrats……..Nancy
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Editor’s note: In this monograph, Robert Spencer reveals the disquieting agenda and goals of those who are working hard to get Muslims elected to political office at the national, state, and local level. He shows how this initiative is gaining ground despite the frank anti-Americanism of Ilhan Omar and others – or is it because of that anti-Americanism?
Building power
“Invest in building power for Muslims in politics,” is the invitation from the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) in a tweet on May 23, 2020, which features a photo of a smiling Salam al-Marayati, MPAC’s President and co-founder, with the notorious Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Ca.).[1] “We ensure that Muslim voices are heard by decision-makers in Washington, DC,” the tweet also says, “and we work diligently with policymakers like Rep. Adam Schiff to advocate for legislation that protects our communities.”[2]
To those who are aware of Adam Schiff’s central role in the attempt to frame President Trump for an impeachable offense and railroad him out of office, MPAC’s upbeat declaration of civic engagement was hardly reassuring. Even more disturbing was the fact that the stated goal was not something to the effect of “Help Muslims begin to participate in the American political process,” much less anything such as “Encourage Muslims to assimilate and adopt American values,” but “invest in building power for Muslims in politics.”
Building power. It is not unreasonable to surmise from this language that MPAC, at very least, appears to be aiming toward establishing a Muslim bloc in American politics, one that will wield power and influence with its Muslim identity at the forefront, contending for candidates and policies that it deems to be in line with Islamic teachings and values.
While there are many organizations in the United States defending their own group’s interests, MPAC’s endeavor is different from the others in that Islamic law, Sharia, is authoritarian by nature, denying the freedom of speech, as well as aggressive, expansionist, and supremacist. In its classic formulations, Islamic law denies equality of rights to women and non-Muslims, and allows for a host of practices that are incompatible in numerous with American principles and customs; discussion of these issues, however, has been effectively silenced by charges of “Islamophobia” and “bigotry,” not least from al-Marayati and MPAC itself.
Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch asked pointed questions in November 2019, after another Islamic advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), sent out a press release celebrating the large number of Muslims who had just been elected to various offices. “One might wonder,” Corcoran wrote, “as I did here in 2007 why if refugees and Muslim migrants of all stripes were eager to assimilate did they need to place their people (representing their religion) into local, state and federal government? And, just imagine, I asked then, if we would blatantly say—we want Catholics, Jews, other Christians as our leaders—wouldn’t all hell break loose in the media? Yet, no one seems to care if CAIR says we are electing our people, Muslims, everywhere we can!”[3]