Tag Archives: criticaltheory

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Daily Broadside | You’re Not the Boss of Me

Monday and a new week in the lead up to Palm Sunday.

If you’ve followed me for a while you know that I am documenting what I believe is a rapid collapse of the United States as founded. Our culture and institutions are sagging under the weight of cultural Marxism in the form of woke orthodoxy or what some are now calling “critical consciousness.”

In a helpful piece that got me thinking about this, the author references an article on Critical Consciousness in New Discourses, where Lindsay says,

… a critical consciousness, sometimes referred to as “critical literacy” or “social justice literacy” […] refers essentially to assuming that society is constructed by systems of power that manifest dominance and oppression mostly in terms of “intersecting” demographic group identities. The slang term for this specific type of critical consciousness, arising since the Black Lives Matter movement propelled it to a widespread meme, is “wokeness.”

I’ve written at length on “Critical Theory” in a six-part series I did here and this article put another piece of the puzzle in place for me by naming the Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire, who is also the villain when it comes to the Marxist destruction of the Church.

We absolutely must hold firm against the unrelenting pressure campaigns of critical consciousness or “wokeness.” One of the first ways to do this is to declare that you will not cooperate with the Marxists, and I came across a post from Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom that expresses this idea so well that I am going to recommend that you read it from start to finish.

But let me give you a taste what he says and which I endorse (with one exception). Here’s how he starts:

Be it so understood:

I refuse to “unpack white violence.” I reject the idea that my existence “perpetuates white power structures.” I will not — and in fact cannot — “examine my implicit biases.” I’m an individual. I refuse to grant determined interpretive communities authority over my being. My meaning is mine. It is what makes me me.

I’m not taking any “journey” to “discover” the impact of my “privilege” on “black and brown peoples.” I will not become “anti-racist” or “anti-fascist” to satisfy your demands. I reject Cultural Marxism. I am an individual. I’m not defined by my color, my religion, my sex. I’m Jeff.

I will not “respect your pronouns” or “celebrate” your “queerness.” I am hostile to your sexualizing of children. I reject your neologisms, your “triggers,” and your desire to control my speech. I know who and what you are: you are my presumptive master, or else the Useful Idiot who empowers him. But I will grant you and your ideology no power over me.

I reject “equity” because it is collectivism disguised as virtue. I reject “inclusivity” because it is inorganic, superficial, and contrived. I reject mandated “diversity”: I will not surrender to the Crayon Box Mafia, nor to the gender changelings who pretend I am a construct answerable to their whims.

“Cultural appropriation” is merely culture: it expands to include, and it makes up the very fabric of a pluralist society. There’s no such thing as “digital blackface.” My whiteness is not “violent”; my sex is not “oppressive”; my religion doesn’t concern you; and my children are not yours to mold. Your beliefs will not be imposed on me. The State will not parent my sons.

“Queer theory” is “critical race theory” is “critical consciousness” is the Marxist rejection of the individual as individual. Cultural Marxism is determined to raze norms, sow chaos, tear families asunder, and reduce being to collective conformity. I reject its premises as fully as I reject its adherents. I will not comply.

He goes on further, just like that. I wish that I had written it myself. My one quibble? Unlike Goldstein, I won’t spit on the enemy’s graves when we win. I will not gloat, I will not shame, I will not abuse. But I will hold the line and I will refuse to surrender. We need more of that fighting spirit when it comes to defeating the cancer that is eating away at our national vital organs.

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Daily Broadside | CRT is the Politics of Envy, Greed and Self-Pity

Daily Verse | Leviticus 19:18
Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.

Wednesday’s Reading: Leviticus 21-23

Wednesday and I thought I’d take a moment to look again at Critical Race Theory, or CRT, because it has severely damaged our national discourse and culture and is contributing to the division that has us fighting each other. Knowing something about it in a simplified form and being able to discuss why it’s a corruption of the American ideal is important in standing firm against the woke scolds who demand that we bow to the new orthodoxy.

I’ve written about CRT in previous posts here and here, and dedicated a whole series to the background of CRT (i.e. cultural Marxism). But I’ve recently come across some helpful essays that make CRT easier to understand and wanted to pass some of it along to you.

Without repeating too much of what I’ve already covered elsewhere, CRT finds its roots in Marxism and, more specifically, in the philosophy of Max Horkheimer who, in the words of Andrew Breitbart, “coined a term that would embody the whole corrupt philosophy of his fellow travelers’ mission to destroy society and culture using the Marxist dialectic: critical theory” (Righteous Indignation).

“Critical theory … was, quite literally, a theory of criticizing everyone and everything everywhere. It was an attempt to tear down the social fabric by using all the social sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, political science, etc.); it was an infinite and unending criticism of the status quo, adolescent rebellion against all established social rules and norms.”

Critical theory’s practitioners eventually realized that competing with the success of America’s capitalist system was a failing strategy. Most Americans were satisfied with their economic station in life, most recognized that anyone who put their mind to it could succeed in American society, and most preferred improving their country to overthrowing it, as Christopher F. Rufo writes in “Critical Race Theory: What it Is and How to Fight It.”

Critical theory then morphed into what we know today as critical race theory. Rufo explains,

Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism.

So we know that it is a formal discipline based in Marxism, but can someone define it? Abe Greenwald offers this description:

There’s much confusion and obfuscation about what CRT is, but it’s very simple. CRT maintains that all the systems that undergird the functioning of the United States are racist by design and produce inequitable results for people of color. All systems—social, governmental, legal, financial, educational, medical, you name it. In practice, this means teaching white children that they are, above all else, oppressors and teaching black children that they are, first and foremost, victims. 

I quoted Seth Grossman a few days ago and he’s worth repeating here:

That [CRT] narrative goes like this: until about 600 years ago, most people in the world lived peaceful, comfortable, and environmentally sustainable lives.

Then, in the 1400s, a bunch of white men in Europe went crazy.  While abusing their women, they built ships and weapons to attack and exploit the rest of the world. These crazy white men exterminated Native Americans, enslaved black Africans, and impoverished Asians. They also started wars and polluted the planet to cause the catastrophic “climate crisis” we have today.

At its core, CRT is an economic scheme that redistributes wealth and reconfigures the societal hierarchy to create equity. Not equality, which is the American ideal, but equity, which is something altogether different. Rufo writes,

There are a series of euphemisms deployed by [CRT’s] supporters to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—is explicitly rejected by critical race theorists. To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression. In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism.

He goes on to explain,

An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property, but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority. Historically, the accusation of “anti-Americanism” has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a matter of interpretation—critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.

Dr. Voddie Baucham agrees. In discussing “social justice” (one of the CRT euphemisms cited above), note how what he describes as the mission of the social justice movement echoes the CRT mission.

Baucham proceeded to break down the mission of the social justice movement:

1. Identify disadvantaged groups.
2. Assess group outcomes.
3. Assign blame for disparate outcomes (i.e. if a group is experiencing a negative outcome, the next step is to determine who is to blame).
4. Finally, there needs to be a redistribution of power and resources in order to redress the group’s grievances.

Baucham offered an important qualifier, which is that the disadvantaged group is never to blame for its own problems — the group is perpetually the victim, always to be believed and sympathized with.

This is why CRT is such a poisonous ideology. It seeks to divide the populace along racial lines with the object being the transfer of wealth and power to the “oppressed” class. The problem is that it is all based on lies. Not that there hasn’t been injustice in America—there has—but that injustice is built into the system and the only way to fix it is to remove those in power and replace the system. Those who are removed from power are replaced with—you guessed it—the aggrieved and the system is replaced with one that favors the aggrieved.

CRT promotes three ideas: race essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation (Rufo). These ideas directly contradict the American principles of equality and justice at the individual level. In essence, CRT adherents seek to destroy American exceptionalism to benefit themselves.

Don’t let them do it.

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Daily Broadside | Cultural Marxists Arrive on America’s Shores

Daily Verse | Psalm 112:1
Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who finds great delight in his commands.

Friday and as we head into the weekend, take some time to celebrate America’s founding on July 4, 1776, when we declared our independence from Great Britain. While the current version of America is a wreck compared to what the Founding Fathers envisioned, it’s greatness is still there. We should be glad that we’ve all had the undeserved privilege of living here. I love this country—always have, always will—and refuse to submit to her critics.

Speaking of critics, today is the fourth in a series of short posts I’m doing on the development of cultural Marxism in the United States, based on Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation. The first three are here, here and here.

In summary, we started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau who believed men were essentially good but that society was a corrupting influence that limited their freedom, and the answer was a new “social contract.” Rousseau was followed by Karl Marx, who thought human nature was formed by society and that the workers were exploited by the owners, limiting their economic freedom and creating inequality. The answer was to tear down society so that communism would naturally take its place, and he predicted (influenced by G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectic theory) that capitalism would eventually fail in favor of socialism.

Surprisingly, two U.S. presidents—Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—embraced Marxist theory, putting it on equal footing with the vision of the Founding Fathers. Fortunately, their policies didn’t get too far, but they opened the door for later politicians to challenge the necessity of the U.S. Constitution. That brings us to the 1920s.

The next stage in the development of cultural Marxism is when those evil seeds were firmly planted in the United States. To get there took a few years.

It started in the early 1900s with Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian socialist and founding member of the Communist Party of Italy. He believed socialism hadn’t yet come into existence in force because capitalism produced “cultural hegemony” through its dominant ideological position in its cultural institutions to maintain power.

“He argued that capitalist power needed to be challenged by building a counter-hegemony. By this he meant that, as part of the war of position, the organic intellectuals and others within the working-class, need to develop alternative values and an alternative ideology in contrast to bourgeois ideology … He believed that a final war of manoeuvre was only possible, in the developed and advanced capitalist societies, when the war of position had been won by the organic intellectuals and the working-class building a counter-hegemony.”

(This is what we know today as “the long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by the German Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke after studying Gramsci’s philosophy. It meant that to bring about socialism, socialists had to embed themselves in a capitalist society’s cultural institutions and work from the inside out to transform its values.)

After Gramsci came György Lukács (1885–1971), a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. He built on Gramsci’s views, believing that Marx’s dialectic materialism wasn’t really a tool for predicting the future as much as it was a tool for tearing down society itself. Here’s how Breitbart describes Lukacs:

“Lukacs’s view was so influential that for a time, he actually became deputy commissar of culture in Hungary, where he proceeded to push a radical sex-ed program encouraging free love and rejection of Judeo-Christian morality. In that role, he tried to live out his ideology of destruction: ‘I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution….A worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries” (RI, p.112).

While Lukács’s political ambitions were short-lived, he eventually landed a role in the Frankfurt School, a German institute funded by a rich socialist activist, Felix Weil. Along with Lukács, Weil brought in Max Horkheimer (1895–1973). And Horkheimer lit the fuse. He “coined a term that would embody the whole corrupt philosophy of his fellow travelers’ mission to destroy society and culture using the Marxist dialectic: critical theory” (emphasis mine; RI, p.113).

It’s important here that I quote Breitbart at length:

“Critical theory … was, quite literally, a theory of criticizing everyone and everything everywhere. It was an attempt to tear down the social fabric by using all the social sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, political science, etc.); it was an infinite and unending criticism of the status quo, adolescent rebellion against all established social rules and norms” (emphasis mine; RI, p.113).

Sound familiar?

“The real idea behind all of this was to make society totally unworkable by making everything basically meaningless. Critical theory does not create; it only destroys, as Horkheimer himself openly stated, ‘Above all … critical theory has no material accomplishments to show for itself'” (emphasis mine; RI, pp.113-114).

Again, does any of this ring some bells?

Horkheimer took over the Frankfurt School in 1930 and brought in “fellow devotees of critical theory like Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. Each agreed with the central idea of critical theory, namely that all of society had to be criticized ad nauseam, all social institutions leveled, all traditional concepts decimated” (RI, p.114).

They would have stayed in Germany except for a little problem called Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power caused them to flee to the United States (almost all of the Frankfurt School scholars were of Jewish heritage). And when they landed here, they found easy access to our cultural institutions because of our tradition of freedom and liberty. They exploited our freedoms to inject their poisonous ideology directly in the veins of our society and culture. The Frankfurt School was almost immediately accepted at Columbia University and

“With the tentacles affixed to the institutions of American higher education, the Frankfurt School philosophy began eking its way into every crevice of American culture. Horkheimer’s ‘critical theory’ became a staple of Philosophy, History, and English courses across the country … Erich Fromm … was pushing cultural Marxism through psychology by blaming Western tradition for the rise of Nazism and the rejection of Marxism … Theodor Adorno was sliding Marxism into the American consciousness by attacking popular trends in the world of art” (RI, pp.116-118).

But as bad as Fromm and Horkheimer were, the worst of them all was Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who founded the “New Left” for breaking down American society. We’ll pick up with him on Monday.

Have a great weekend, and may God bless America!