Critical Race Theory – FACT SHEET
What is Critical Race Theory? How did it take over our military so quickly? How does it relate to Intersectionalism? Why are today’s leftists so obsessed with glorifying and propagandizing “gender-bending” persons and activities?
Historical basis; precedent and divergence.
· Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a reboot of Marxism, with demographics having replaced economics.
· Until 2020, CRT was referred to by conservative intellectuals as “cultural Marxism.”
· Like Bolsheviks or Maoists, CRT’s proponents are totalitarians who brook no dissent, aiming to destroy all who stand in their way. Under CRT, merely standing up for the free speech or due process rights of the accused is a crime, and the perpetrators must be rubbed out and expunged from the public sphere.
· However, where “traditional” Marxism splits the world into tenant farmer or wage-slave oppressed vs. large property/asset-owning oppressors, CRT identifies the oppressed mostly by skin color as well as by sexual preferences. This throws Marxism upside down, inverting the oppressor-oppressed numerical proportion pyramid.
· In the “traditional” version, the oppressed constitute the overwhelming share of any population. But CRT quickly ran out of minorities who would take it seriously (blue-collar blacks and Hispanics already have a religion) and ended up chasing after—and setting on a pedestal to worship—persons of the cross-dressing or sex-change persuasion, who comprise perhaps 1/500 of the population in Western countries, and closer to zero in others. CRT has thus substituted extreme outlier, envelope-pushing, “shock doctrine” exoticism for genuine, broad-based, “oppressed minority” buy-in.
· While the oppressed are “holy” in both true Marxism and CRT, in the former, any rich kid can have an epiphany and become a hero-saint for the oppressed (e.g., Che Guevarra.) Conversely, in CRT, the oppressors, even if “woke” (hip to the movement), are relegated to the role of peasant spectators at a hanging, or whipping their own backs like medieval cultists.
· In CRT, the “oppressed”—regardless of their career or wealth status; even black/brown millionaires are oppressed—are a fixed caste, and only they can speak for themselves. To even hint at speaking from the perspective of the oppressed, or to challenge anything that an oppressed person might say about his or her own subjective experience, constitutes a display of “white fragility”, or some such offense.
· Although Marxist-inspired, CRT has other influences. Its “woke oppressor” self-flagellation is an obvious religious experience—an “I’m a sinner, save me Jesus” session for unbelievers. Its public shaming sessions hearken to the Maoist terror of China’s Cultural Revolution period.
· While Marxism was originally a true revolutionary movement, CRT came up slowly through the universities and is now systematically aiming for all other institutions, including large corporations, the military, and of course, primary schools (they are coming for your kids.) In CRT, there is no revolution, merely a Gramscian “march through the institutions”, which was greatly accelerated in the U.S. in 2020.
· Like other hysterias in American—the Salem witch craze, temperance/Prohibition, McCarthyism—and world (e.g. the Reign of Terror in France) history, CRT has a small core of very aggressive, true believers, and a much larger accretion disk of groupies, opportunists, lip-servants—such as, for one current example, top military officers who need a few more months/years in uniform before they can retire at maximum pension and make millions of dollars sitting on woke corporate boards. Groupies and opportunists reading the weathervane is what allows CRT-like psychosis-fads to blow up as they do.
· The hugely lopsided ratio of groupies and opportunists to true believers has been a weakness in these movements, making them seem all-powerful, then sending them suddenly into oblivion after some power at the top says “enough!”, and/or the groupies peel off, as no population can live in hysteria indefinitely.
Intersectionalism.
· CRT has established a hierarchy of status among the oppressed, such that blacks (for example) are holy, but a black lesbian is holier, and a black person of the cross-dressing or sex-change persuasion is probably holiest. The more identity elements (or the rarer and more exotic they are), the more deeply oppressed and the higher the status.
· CRT’s obsession with these “multiple identities” is known as “Intersectionalism.”
· Intersectionalism is intended to foster a victimhood mentality, as while (for example) ethnic Koreans tend to do very well in the USA, a college student steeped in intersectional thinking—while attending a top coastal university with a 25 percent “Asian” student body—may see herself as in particularly dire straits due to her being Korean and a woman and an atheist who survived a Methodist upbringing.
· This non-empirical pseudoscience also gives the CRT-washed mind a feeling of uniqueness, as for some, being a “hyphen-American” is not enough of a distinction/differentiation.
· These special snowflakes go on to proselytize for those who have tuned them in to their uniqueness. (This is a threat—perhaps a deliberate, conscious one—to the American model of near-total assimilation of immigrants within one to several generations.)
· On the other hand, in true Marxism, the oppressed are one big undifferentiated mass—so undifferentiated that they are referred to, in the singular, as “the proletariat.”
Opportunism.
· True Marxism offers salvation through a proletarian utopia, while CRT offers endless white shame and guilt for some, and victimhood/alienation for others. There is no positive vision, except for those selling CRT-related books, training manuals, seminars, and consulting services, as well as some HR/diversity directors and others who have boarded the train for gain, such as many low-quality professors who would have failed their tenure vote until they began intimidating their colleagues with CRT-speak.
· True Marxists would call CRT a power-grab and shakedown racket by a marginal element of the bourgeoisie (the upper middle class, or sub-elites) against the mainstream bourgeoisie and the capitalists. True Marxists would perceive CRT as a hoax. They would not take it seriously, except as a case study in intra-elite battles within decadent capitalist societies of the Anglosphere.
Partisan-electoral aspects.
· CRT proponents do not stand against the state and “the powers that be.” They are not looking to radically change U.S. foreign policy, to stop the imperialist “war machine”, to cut military spending, to reign in the Patriot Act, Google, Wall Street, or any of those things that leftists were into even just five-six years ago. Having dumped the economic orientation of Marxism, they don’t aim to take all the money from the rich—they’d like to be rich themselves. Despite their rhetoric about “systems of power and oppression”, they don’t care about the banks, online privacy, or any other actual “power” issue.
· For these reasons, they have been accepted as allies, fellow travelers, and an inspiration by the Democrat party. As long as CRT proponents get their “cut”, they present no conceivable near-term threat to any Democrat interest group.
· CRT proponents are not revolutionaries at all. Functionally, they have become the main social stream within the Democrat party.
· This attachment to the Democrats is a risk to CRT, as if the Democrats fare poorly in elections, they would have to distance themselves from it, and all the woke corporations that take the Democrats’ cue (to be closer to power, for money’s sake) would follow suit. CRT would recede, withdrawing to the universities from which it came.
· Democrats and their media understand this risk so well that they never acknowledge CRT, never speaking of it except as a “conspiracy theory”, as Virginia governor candidate Terry McAuliffe did when asked about CRT in Virginia schools. (CRT and Intersectionalism, under the euphemisms of “antiracism” and “learning about multiple identities”, are being established at some expense in northern Virginia school districts.)
· Readers will recall how Democrats and their media dismissed Antifa as an “idea”, and to a large extent even denied that the 2020 nationwide riots and looting were happening, until the “see no riots, hear no riots” line began costing them in opinion polls last August. At that point, the riots stopped almost overnight.
· Following that precedent, we might see CRT withdrawn from the mainstream political arena if it becomes an obvious drag to Democrat electoral prospects.
