Radical activists now confront America with a host of unsapient policies, subversive activism, and false narratives like the 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter (BLM), and Critical Race Theory (CRT). The Progressives who champion these false and woke critiques threaten who we are as a nation, accompanied by equally radical proposals to remake our basic institutions.
Furthermore, the progressive activists who lead these woke movements have targeted America’s schools to impose a revolutionary transformation on our country and they also seek to transform the family, work, the marketplace, government, law, religion, entertainment, sports—all of American society with neo-Marxist ideologies. This cannot be allowed to happen and now is the time to wake up to this woke Progressivism madness before it’s too late to stop it.
America is exceptional not least because of its long traditions of antislavery, abolition, and dedication to a civic equality that transcends race. It is one of the least racist countries in the world and its citizens of all races have achieved extraordinary prosperity and liberty. The peoples of the world seek to become American because our nation offers opportunity to all. Woke radical activists must engage in hallucinatory defamation to erase these facts.
Shall We Surrender to Marxist CRT?
The progressive activists who lead these movements have targeted America’s schools as the means by which to impose a revolutionary transformation on our country. These activists believe not only that our schools are the linchpin of our apparatus of racial injustice and oppression but also the means by which to force their so-called “liberation” on America. They will seize our children’s minds to seize America’s future.
As previously noted, these radical activists seek to transform the family, work, the marketplace, government, law, religion, entertainment, sports—all of American society with neo-Marxist ideologies. Their proposals to accomplish this are sweeping. They include a call to establish “equity” that requires a quasi-totalitarian imposition of job quotas and the suppression of all opposing speech as part of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.
But every such proposal is ultimately a plan to change the way Americans think. They require a transformation of our schools from places that teach students to seek out truth to places that teach students to seek out power so as to revolutionize America. No free people would accept the radicals’ plans, so they wish to teach our children to embrace tyranny, by persuading them that tyranny is actually fairness or justice. How does this happen?
They abuse the authority delegated to the schools to propagandize and coerce a captive audience, who must assent to indoctrination or risk all the damage to career prospects that follows from poor grades.
They exploit the innocence and naiveté of the impressionable young Americans who are in no position to recognize the falsehoods and distortions embedded in these appeals.
The proponents of neo-racism—to give this collection of radical critiques a unifying name—most of all wish to impose their theory as a curriculum.
They intend to compel every person to study that curriculum, from early childhood education through high school, college, graduate study, vocational training, and on-the-job instruction.
Or Shall We Stand and Fight For Our Republic?
We approve wholeheartedly MLK's equality of opportunity—but oppose emphatically neo-racism's forced equity of outcomes (the "equity" portion of DEI) because we uphold the value of human freedom. Freedom is an intellectual as well as a political virtue: the freedom to think for oneself and the freedom of a people to govern themselves are distinguishable but interdependent. Intellectual freedom allows us to pursue the truth, which entails encountering and weighing the validity of conflicting views.
Political freedom is the attempt to frame laws and reach decisions through orderly and peaceful processes that give due weight to the many and often conflicting judgments of the governed. There can be no political freedom without intellectual freedom.
And yet this is exactly what neo-racism demands—the end of intellectual freedom. The proponents of so-called “Antiracism” state this most explicitly when they assert that anyone who dissents from their view that America is a systemically racist nation perpetuates racism and deserves to be silenced.
Neo-racism’s proponents explicitly advocate for censorship. Their doctrines brook no disagreement, dissent, skepticism, or demand for evidence. Their position is that the only allowable intellectual position is enthusiastic assent to their dogma.
This sort of intellectual totalitarianism is not new. Neo-racism imitates the logic of Marxism, which uses opposition to its arguments to confirm them. Only a class traitor would doubt the necessity of the revolution. The same self-confirming circularity always accompanies movements that suppress intellectual and political freedom.
Only witches would doubt the prevalence of witches, and therefore the witch-deniers must be condemned as witches. Neo-racism at its core is yet another of the witchcraft hysterias that chronically afflict society. America has never been immune to these disorders. We feel ashamed when we awake from them, but we forget our better selves while we are in the midst of them.
Now is the time to wake up before we do even graver damage—not only to ourselves individually but to our country as a whole. It is a bitter irony of our moment that those who want to drive us into this new hysteria often claim to be “woke.” There is no awakening in woke. It is the sleep of reason that produces monsters, and it poses a profound peril to our republic.
Article content courtesy of the forthcoming Progressivism Madness: A SAPIENT Being’s Guide to the Idiocracy and Hypocrisy of the ‘Regressivism’ Movement (Winter 2023).