Recommended Reading

It looks to me as if Pete Buttigieg could be the Democrat Party's next nominee for President of the United States. So, what's this guy all about? Forewarned is forearmed. 

For starters, see Secretary Pete: ‘Remove City Highways To Fix Racial Inequities’ (November 9, 2021, at Bunkerville's blog).  Excerpt:

...Some cities, such as Syracuse, N.Y., want to tear down portions of urban highways, restore old street grids and redevelop neighborhoods. O’Toole is skeptical, saying highway demolition could increase traffic congestion in local neighborhoods and lead to other unintended consequences. 

“I’m afraid what we’re going to see with this $20 billion is anti-road people tearing out roads,” O’Toole said....

Read the rest HERE at Bunkerville.

These "true believers" in racial equity are dangerous, IMO.

Fake News

Silverfiddle Rant!

From Gallup...

* 9% in U.S. trust mass media "a great deal" and 31% "a fair amount"

* 27% have "not very much" trust and 33% "none at all"

* The percentage with no trust at all is a record high, up five points since 2019

Complaints of "the lying news media" are common, but the purveyors of propaganda are much more subtle that that.  Most of the press does not outright lie, they instead rely upon artistic use of tone, tenor and shading to sculpt key sentences in a story for maximum propaganda value.  

Here is an excellent example:  One sentence from a CNN article designed not to convey the news that Tennessee has passed an anti-CRT bill, but rather to ridicule the conservatives who passed the bill: 

Section 51, part 6 of the Tennessee law makes lesson plans illegal if students "feel discomfort, guilt, or anguish."

That Tennessee law sounds idiotic and legally unsound, doesn't it?  

Here is the actual text from the law:

(a) An LEA or public charter school shall not include or promote the following concepts as part of a course of instruction or in a curriculum or instructional program, or allow teachers or other employees of the LEA or public charter school to use supplemental instructional materials that include or promote the following concepts:

(6) An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual's race or sex;

So, rightly stated, the law says...

Tennessee public schools are banned from teaching that "An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex."

See the difference?

If dragged into a court of law, CNN could defend every word of their deliberate misstatement, because it has all been vetted by their lawyers.  So, CNN is broadcasting fact-checked, legally parsed propaganda designed to inflame, outrage and ridicule.  

CNN--and most of the rest of our Infotainment Media Complex--is only a hair's breadth better than sensationalist tabloids full of Elvis sightings, Gordon Ramsey's sex dwarf, 500 pound house cats and Dick Cheny is a Robot headlines.

But is that really what we want?  We deserve better than barely-legal propaganda disguised as news.

Critical Race Theory is Illiberal

Silverfiddle Rant!

Andrew Sullivan makes the best argument yet contra Critical Race Theory (not the narrow academic theory but all the Ibram Kendi/Robin DiAngelo pop-psychology pseudo-science racial dogma that has sprung up like stink weeds around it).  The Crux of Sullivan's unassailable argument?  

Critical Race Theory is incompatible with the classical liberalism upon which our Western civilization is founded.

He starts by listing some characteristics of classic Western liberalism:

Fallibilism, the belief that anyone, especially you, can always be wrong; 

Objectivity, a rejection of any theory that cannot be proven or disproven by reality; 

Accountability, the openness to conceding and correcting error; 

Pluralism, the maintenance of intellectual diversity so we maximize our chances of finding the truth.

No ultimate authority; just inquiry and provisional truth. No final answer: an endless conversation. No single power, but many in competition.

In this open-ended conversation, all can participate, conservatives and liberals, and will have successes and failures in their turn. What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means. That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom.

My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.

CRT Rejects Western Liberalism

This is what makes CRT different. When it began, critical theory was one school of thought among many. But the logic of it — it denies the core liberal premises of all the other schools and renders them all forms of oppression — means that it cannot long tolerate those other schools. It must always attack them.

Critical theory is therefore always the cuckoo in the academic nest. Over time, it throws out its competitors — and not in open free debate. It does so by ending that debate, by insisting that the liberal “reasonable person” standard of debate is, in fact, rigged in favor of the oppressors, that speech is a form of harm, even violent harm, rather than a way to seek the truth. It insists that what matters is the identity of the participants in a debate, not the arguments themselves

This debate is not about whether you are a racist or an antiracist. The debate is about whether, in your deepest heart and soul, you are a liberal or an anti-liberal. And of those two options, I have no doubt where I stand. Do you?

Read Andrew Sullivan's excellent essay here: Removing the Bedrock of Liberalism

See also:  Political Tea Leaves - Andrew Sullivan, "White Supremacist!"?

Anti-Racists: In Their Own Words

Silverfiddle Rant!

This is Marjory Tailor Greene on the left, cloaked in academic robes:

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” - Dr. Kendi

We discussed CRT last week, and I am learning along with all of you.  I now think that what is being taught in schools, corporations and government bureaucracies is not textbook CRT, but rather CRT's pop psychology crack baby.  Whatever you call it, an increasing number of Americans don't like it.  Having said that, I still think CRT is a good handle.

"Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law." (Critical Race Theory - An Introduction)

Followed up by their nods to Gramsci and Derrida, it is clear the Critical Race theorists are all about tearing down a system where in the span of 160 years, black people have gone from the chains of slavery to university graduates, professors, doctors, decorated soldiers, generals, CEOs of major corporations, etc. 

In this society they want to tear down, POC students sit equally beside "white" students, POC enjoy equal status, and supervision over, "white" people in workplaces all over America, and POC are fully embedded in our military, and most importantly in our de-segregated neighborhoods. "White" people and people of color enjoy parties in each others homes, school functions, BBQs and sporting events together.

This is the system the carnival barkers, grifters, charlatans, latte leftists and Che Guevara wannabes want to tear down. Fie on them all.

CRT Critic and hate totem of the left, Chris Rufo sums it up best: 

"The game is that they want to create an essentialized racial category ("whiteness"), load it with negative connotations, then impose it on individuals through guilt, shame, and school indoctrination. This approach is reductive, manipulative, and malicious. Don't fall for it."

Chris Rufo has a website that features his Critical Race Theory Briefing Book.  Here are a few quotations:

“All whites are racist … because we benefit from systemic white privilege. -- Wildman and Davis, Readings for Diversity and Social Justice

“All white people are racist or complicit by virtue of benefiting from privileges that are not something they can voluntarily renounce.” -- Barbara Applebaum, Being White, Being Good

“Whiteness by its very definition and operation as a key element of white supremacy kills; it is mental and physical terrorism. To end the white terrorism that is directed at racially oppressed people here and in other nations, it is essential that self-identified whites and their whiteness collaborators among the racially oppressed confront their white problem head-on, unencumbered by racial comfort.” -- Johnny Williams in the Hartford Courant

“White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions … Entering the conversation with this understanding is freeing because it allows us to focus on how—rather than if—our racism is manifest.” -- Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility

I do not want anyone to silence, ban, censor, cancel or deny tenure to Robin DiAngelo, Ibram Kendi, Nikole Hannah Jones or the rest of their fellow travelers.  I want those people to come down from their gilded pulpits and debate: State their thesis and submit their ideas to academic examination and debate with those who oppose their half-baked hokum.  

Links:

Daily Wire: It was a real quote

Josh Hawley takes on CRT

Washington Post urges Americans to set up 'white accountability groups' and force themselves into 'a period of deep shame' over their skin color

Clarence Page: Can the Left Defend CRT?

What is Critical Race Theory?

Silverfiddle Rant!

I have a very-limited understanding based on cursory perusal of some CRT articles and one book. This post won't explain it to you.  I will provide here a few links to things written by CRT partisans and some quotations from those sources. 

First up, a 'Splainer from the splainiest splainers of the progressive left, Vox.  They lament the fact that CRT has morphed into a catchall category, one used by Republicans who want to ban anti-racist teachings and trainings in classrooms and workplaces across the country.

Critical race theory emerged in law schools in the 1970s and ’80s as an alternative to the mainstream discourse and classes on civil rights law, many of which held that the best way to fight racial discrimination was to enact legal reforms.

Critical race theorists...posited that racism is endemic and institutionalized in the United States.

The group was skeptical of legal theories that supported colorblindness, objectivity, and neutrality

Every analysis of the law should be grounded in historical context, arguing that “racism has contributed to all contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines, including differences in income, imprisonment, health, housing, education, political representation, and military service.”

Critical race theory acknowledges, values, and centers the knowledge of people of color who experience racism daily.

Critical race theory is “interdisciplinary and eclectic,” meaning it borrowed from a number of traditions like feminism, Marxism, and critical legal theory.

“The interests of all people of color necessarily require not just adjustments within the established hierarchies, but a challenge to hierarchy itself.”

The Vox article tracks with the book, Critical Race Theory, An Introduction, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.  From the book:

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.

Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

It also draws from certain European philosophers and theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci and Jacques Derrida, as well as from the American radical tradition exemplified by such figures as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Power and Chicano movements of the sixties and early seventies.

The book's introduction lists several CRT propositions:

Racism is ordinary, not aberrational—“normal science,” the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country.

Most would agree that our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.

Race and races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient.

Intersectionality

The voice-of-color thesis holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/a writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know. Minority status, in other words, brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism.

You can search and read the entire book on-line here.

What say you?

CRT Sematical Jiggery Pokery

Silverfiddle Rant!

Critical Race Theory is under sustained attack by grass roots Americans all across the ideological spectrum.  

The CRT grifters are fighting back with one of the pseudo-intellectual left's favorite tactics:  Semantical Jiggery Pokery.  Like when a good American scorns a progressive policy by calling it socialist, and a thousand sneering pedants emerge to tie you up in dorm room sophistries involving the differences between communism, marxism, socialism, etc and mock you as ignorant for not knowing all the terms.  

Common sense people lose patience with this.  It's like pornography.  I don't need to be steeped in the theories and history of porn to know it when I see it.  

Leftists are shouting down the burgeoning CRT rebellion by saying the WrongThinkers don't even know what Critical Race Theory is, or they misunderstand its terms, they are applying it to phenomena that are not CRT.  My favorite:  Imperiously stating one cannot argue against CRT until one has slogged through thousands of pages of turgid CRT "theory," which is at best a hodge-podge of writings with no foundation of facts, data or quantitative analysis one can use to judge the validity of its many claims.

One of the tenured high lords of Anti-Racism compares his science-free area of study to astrophysics. He has built his career on either-or fallacies like this...

The cause of racial inequity is either racist policy or racial hierarchy. The racial problem is the result of bad policies or bad people.

Either Black and Latino people are the least likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because there’s something wrong with them—or the inequity stems from racist policy. Either Black girls are six times as likely to be expelled from school as white girls because they misbehave more—or the inequity is caused by racist policy. To believe in racial hierarchy, to say that something is wrong with a racial group, is to express racist ideas.

Leftwing partisans like Joy Reid (why are the two crabbiest, most joyless women on TV ironically both named Joy?) respond by using their control of the medium and microphone to shout down anyone making sense.  See:  RCP - Joy Reid v Chris Rufo

So is it really CRT that has parents all across the US in revolt?  

Technically, probably not, based on my limited study, but that is irrelevant. In order to freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it, you first have to name it.

The National Review editors provide the best defense for calling this crap CRT, even if that doesn't technically fit what is going on in classrooms, government employee seminars and corporate training sessions:

The intellectual roots of CRT can be found in Marxist-influenced critical theory, which began in the academia of Weimar Germany. It developed into an “intersectional” ideology at Harvard Law School in the late 1980s, through Kimberlé Crenshaw and other supporters of Professor Derrick Bell. In recent years, however, it has metastasized into the pop psychology of bestsellers such as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility as well as pseudohistory such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project.

What say you?