Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The Reign of the Woke is starting to totter. The excesses of the tyranny of the tiny trans minority is getting significant pushback, from consumers boycotting woke corporate fellow-travelers like Bud Light and Disney, to parents challenging schools that attempt to usurp their authority over their children.
More significant in the long run, some state universities’ governors are rejecting requirements for faculty and scholars to sign loyalty pledges to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion ideology.
The latest grove of academe to end this noxious practice is the Arizona system comprising five campuses with 142,000 students. In addition, the Foundation for Individual Freedom in Education has filed suit against California’s community college system on behalf of six professors to stop the state’s imposition of regulations that require allegiance to highly contested political ideologies, virtually cancelling both academic freedom and the First Amendment.
We should all celebrate these pushbacks, since the politicized dogma of “woke,” as well as the requirement of fealty to it, violates the very core of the university’s traditional mission and purpose: “to know the best that has been known and thought in the world,” as Matthew Arnold defined it, “irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other consideration whatsoever,” and “through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”
The pseudo-concepts of “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” have long been “stock notions” that our “woke” commissars “follow staunchly and mechanically.” Typical of all tyrannies, these words have been warped into propaganda advertising an illiberal political program of expanding the political power of one faction of citizens at the expense of others’ freedom––the cost being paid by our unalienable rights to freely think, and freely speak in the public square our opinions and beliefs.
This political abuse of language was identified as far back as Thucydides’ justly famous description of social and civil breakdown that followed the violent revolutions during the Peloponnesian War: “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, incapacity to act on any.”
Our unholy verbal trinity displays the same corruption. “Diversity” is the most abused, having been written into federal law by the recently overturned Bakke vs. Regents Supreme Court decision of 1978. This word, however, never has been defined by our race-mongers, nor have the benefits supposedly provided by it. But it’s clear that this spurious “diversity” never has had anything to do with actual diversity, whether of complex ethnic diversity, or the more critical diversity of individuals, their minds, and their characters.
Instead, old “scientific” racism’s crude, indiscriminate, superficial categories like “black” or “white” ––much easier for government seeking to identify political clients for its purposes of distributing benefits like set-asides in government contracts––now provide the only meaning of “diversity.” As David E. Bernstein writes in Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, “The government developed its classification scheme via a combination of amateur anthropology and sociology, interest group lobbying, incompetence, inertia, lack of public oversight, and happenstance.” In short, to achieve partisan political aims, not true diversity.
And, just as 2400 years ago Thucydides recognized, today “diversity” in fact means the opposite: a rigid, homogeneous orthodoxy of an illiberal political ideology that brooks no dissent, and seeks to silence the true diversity of ideas and opinions in order to aggrandize more power and influence for one faction, the “woke” Democrats, at the expense of all the other diverse factions.
Like “diversity,” “equity” also recalls a dysfunction of representative democracy recognized 2400 years ago. True equality is the equality of opportunity and equal rights on a level playing field, where each is free to strive as far as his character, talent, hard work, and yes, luck, can take him. But one of the most pernicious consequences of collectivism has been radical egalitarianism, which depends on levelling off all those disparities of talent, industry, and virtue. As Aristotle wrote, “it arises from the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.”
But since people are in fact unequal in various respects, to create absolute equality requires a tyranny that can take from some to redistribute to others against their will. And given humanity’s innate destructive passions like greed and the lust for power, this levelling will require, as Rudyard Kipling put it, “robbing selected Peter to pay collective Paul.” Those who take, moreover, will not base redistribution on merit or even need, but to reward political clients and promote one factional ideology and interests over those of others.
As we have increasingly seen, the result is––apart from the gross violations of our unalienable rights–– the dilution of standards and the abandonment of merit in order to ensure the right clients benefit, and the “disparate impacts” that naturally follow from diverse differences in talent or virtue, are corrected.
Yet in actual practice, the result is not justice, even for the beneficiaries, who are robbed of the pride of achievement and reduced to dependence on political patrons, but rather injustice as those who do succeed on their merits must be punished to reward those who don’t. But even that injustice is not the worst consequence: eventually, as the state grows more powerful and intrusive, the masses will indeed become more and more “equal” in their poverty and subjection, while the elite aggrandize more and more wealth and power. “Equity” then becomes its opposite, inequality.
The last bastardized word, “inclusion,” is a mere redundancy. Once “diversity” and “equity” make their mischief, you will perforce have “inclusion,” which means the ruling party’s political clients who now share in the favorable regulations, transfers of tax dollars, social and political recognition, and the privilege of being exempt from the laws that are applied with ruthless vigor to their political enemies. Just compare the fates of journalist Andy Ngo to Antifa thugs, trans activists to pro-life Christians, BLM rioters to conservative Catholics, or Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton and the Biden clan.
Still think we have the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws”?
The DEI phenomenon is diametrically opposed to the principles and laws comprising our Constitution: unalienable rights that inhere in individuals rather than collectives, and are beholden only to “Nature and Nature’s God,” not other men; the sovereignty of citizens from whom government derives its powers, and to whom government is accountable; and the primacy of laws rather than the power and interests of corruptible, flawed human beings.
Finally, and most important, these empty slogans are nonetheless a threat to the whole purpose of our government in the first place––political freedom and political equality for citizens, families, and civil society. The “woke” tyranny of DEI policies weaken all those principles and the freedom they make possible, and as such, it needs to die.
Wow, such verboseness, such parsing: please, for the love of humanity, keep it simple:
DEI are communist political minder systems, this should be blatantly OBVIOUS to any who made it beyond 10th grade, especially to those over the age of 35 or 40 years!
Communist political minder systems —- they did not spontaneously just happen: Soros, Gates, Wyss, Stryker, Pritzker, Bloomberg, Zuckerberg, et al.
Those are individuals who can do whatever they like with their money, but, they are no longer behaving as individuals, they have been bought together in the World Economic Forum, the World Trade Organisation, the World pHarma Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, and the list keeps growing.
The list ultimately reaches the United Nations.
Defund the UN now!
Well, an article should consist of more than one or two sentences. It’s not like this one was actually verbose or prolix.
And most listed are from the same little money grubbing heritage. A heritage thrown out of 109 Nations for the same evil, anti-American acts they are doing now inside
America.
Thank you for quoting Thucydides and Aristotle two actual founders of Western civilization.
But according to religious conservatives Thucydides and Aristotle are godless pagans. Their godless paganism could not possibly have anything to offer the West. According to religious conservatives only Abraham, Moses, and Jesus can save the West.
But in fact modern totalitarianism comes from religion. Judaism prepared the ground for Christianity and both prepared the ground for Islam and Marxism.
The father of the idea that the highest moral purpose of a human life is the pursuit and achievement of personal, individual, happiness in this life on earth, in this one and only reality, does not come from Abraham, Moses, or Jesus Christ, and certainly not from Mohammed or Karl Marx, but from that godless pagan Aristotle.
“For Aristotle, the good life is one of personal self-fulfillment. Man should enjoy the values of this world. Using his mind to the fullest, each man should work to achieve his own happiness here on earth. And in the process he should be conscious of his own value. Pride, writes Aristotle—a rational pride in oneself and in one’s moral character—is, when it is earned, the “crown of the virtues.”
A proud man does not negate his own identity. He does not sink selflessly into the community. He is not a promising subject for the Platonic state.
Although Aristotle’s writings do include a polemic against the more extreme features of Plato’s collectivism, Aristotle himself is not a consistent advocate of political individualism. His own politics is a mixture of statist and antistatist elements. But the primary significance of Aristotle, or of any philosopher, does not lie in his politics. It lies in the fundamentals of his system: his metaphysics and epistemology….
There is no future for the world except through a rebirth of the Aristotelian approach to philosophy. This would require an Aristotelian affirmation of the reality of existence, of the sovereignty of reason, of life on earth—and of the splendor of man.
Aristotle and Objectivism agree on fundamentals and, as a result, on this last point, also. Both hold that man can deal with reality, can achieve values, can live non-tragically. Neither believes in man the worm or man the monster; each upholds man the thinker and therefore man the hero. Aristotle calls him “the great-souled man.” Ayn Rand calls him Howard Roark, or John Galt.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels”
So Thornton threw you a bone and you made a whole skeleton out of it. Perhaps you didn’t see he has written a book entitled “Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of the Majority from the Greeks to Obama.”
So what do you do? You regurgitate the usual whiny garbage about religion and totalitarianism. And give yet another copy paste job by Peikoff.
This collection of long dead Greeks didn’t create anything that didn’t disappear with coming of Christianity, which had more to do with the creation of Western Civilization than the greeks ever did.
Greek philosophy, your foundation and bedrock of the rational and scientific beginnings and aspects of Western Civilization, folded like a cheap suit in the face of the spread of Christianity, which absorbed the teachings of your pagan heroes. Your heroes worshiped many Gods. So what is your problem with God? Without Christianity Greek history would resemble those ruins that everyone takes selfies at. Without Christianity no one would remember or care about the Greeks or their fragile democracy.
But hey, nice try
Like you said, Christianity absorbed (stoled from,) greek philosophy. Without it, it’s just a jumble of Jewish mumbo jumbo
You had me until you mentioned objectivism and ayn Rand.
Have you read her works? If you have please explain to me what you find wrong with her philosophy.
The absolute racism of LeftTwats is obvious to everyone with a positive IQ..
They have the plantation mentality that minorities are too stupid to achieve anything. And the communist mentality that anybody that succeeds must have done so at the expense of others.
This ideology is not only racist and stupid, it is outright illegal. But since they control the judicial system laws don’t apply to them
Here at the University of New Mexico, the DEI department is loaded with political hacks with an assistant making $58,000 and is on the Board of Directors of the ACLU. (Raise from $42,000 African-American)
LEADER: Zerai, Assata VP for Equity and Inclusion 99 VP, EI/Chief Div Officer Primary 100 $258,994 (copied from the Salary Handbook “Sunshine.unm dot edu. Raise from $242,000 African American and a radical past. Look her up. She wrote a long rant in support of BLACK LIVES MATTER on her official UNM Page, when her job alone means that ALL LIVES MATTER but don’t dare counter with that!)
There are also FOUR assistants making $50-80,000!
TRY WEARING A MAGA HAT AT UNM! Will Assata’s office defend you?
At tiny University of Utah, last time I checked, they had 34 DEI personnel —- and it is that way across North America (USA and Canada, unsure about Mexico) —- within school systems, universities and colleges, public library systems, corporations and the US military!
DEI = communist political minder systems — has nothing to do with race, everything to do with inducing Maoist thought!
Yes, they are grifters. The private sector has begun to shed them… Maybe public institutions will…some day. I work gor a very woke school district which is ramming down my throat the same garbage, but I’m fighting back
The diversity movements was always about promoting division. The goal was always creating as many factions among the public that could be manipulated for political purposes, and greatly decreasing the likelihood of a united public tossing out/rejecting the governing class.
They don’t fear Trump, they do fear the possibility of the united public over-ruling the desires of the governing class. That’s why they’re going after him so hard.
Good observation. They don’t fear Donald Trump so much as they fear his popularity, an indicator of just how much they are failing. They want to RULE us, but we won’t be ruled.
This article is a beautiful scholarly argument against DEI and woke.
However for me as a social media warrior on several platforms, I want to reach the average voter by simply referring to the Democrat ideology as Communism or Fascism or both so that people who vote understand what is happening. Democrat voters are unaware that they are supporting tyranny and that includes members of my own family. I think we have to refer to the “Democrat Communist Party” out loud and over and over again in order to save our Constitutional Republic in the next election. Progressive communist tyranny is happening before our eyes yet everyone seems to pretend that this is politics as usual. Of course the Democrat FascistCommies will object but then I’ll link them this article hoping they have the time and patience to read it.
“. . everyone seems to pretend that this is politics as usual. ”
THANK YOU —— so perfectly articulated and so unbelievably bizarre to the sane amongus!
Only those whose participation in politics is limited to voting according to the “R” or “D” following a candidates name see it as “politics as usual”. Their “civic duty” is fulfilled through the physical action of traveling to a polling station and making a selection. There is no thinking involved other than remembering on which day to vote.
Its time to Evict the whole rotten UN from America we want no part of their Globalists Plans we c an aid other Nations after a Natural Disaster
If “Diversity” is our strength, is then Unity our weakness?