A Recipe for Cultural Suicide

As a supplement to my post, “Waking up from Wokeness,” I want to share a very interesting American Thought Leaders video interview with Peter Boghossian, Assistant Professor at Portland State University, a lifelong liberal and atheist who shares our concern about the current cultural landscape. (See my post, “Conservatives and Liberals Unite!“)

As host, Jan Jekielek, points out, Boghossian goes so far as to say that liberal atheists and conservative Christians have more in common than one might think. Boghossian recently tweeted this point:

I don’t think he could’ve stated it with any more clarity. When we think it’s about liberal or conservative, or even political parties, we’ve totally missed what’s been going on over the last several years. The cultural battlelines have changed dramatically. It really is the new totalitarian thoughtpolice silencing those who still love free speech and liberty.

These are the present-day witch-hunting religious fanatics—the “Social Justice Warriors” on a delusional moral crusade totally detached from reality. And now we’re all experiencing the fruit of this destructive ideology that’s been taught in the fringe departments of our universities for decades.

Boghossian, who himself comes from academia, said if we want to keep the insanity from getting worse, we need to stop funding universities and public schools who teach this Orwellian ‘woke’ religion.

“We can’t just keep funding people who are playing in make-believe-land, cranking out information to inform public policy that’s completely divorced from reality. It’s a recipe for cultural suicide.”

This is spot-on. These people who are now telling us that things like evidence and facts are “tools of the white man and the patriarchy” are forcing our culture off the proverbial cliff. No sensible person should think this is good. Unfortunately, most people aren’t paying attention and only have a sound-bite level of understanding of what’s actually going on. The rest are too afraid to talk about it outloud.

I also want to mention two websites and two articles of note that were mentioned in the interview:

Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). This organization is dedicated to pushing back against the new intolerance, bigotry, and racism coming from our universities, big corporations, and government. Here’s what the site says about why this organization was formed:

“Increasingly, American institutions — colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools — are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to view each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.”

New Discourses.  One of this site’s founders is James Lindsey, co-author of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, which I did a post about here. This movement is like a think-tank version of the #Walkaway movement I mentioned last time. Here’s how they self-describe their website:

“We like to think of this place as a home for the politically homeless, especially for those who feel like they’ve been displaced from their political homes because of the movement sometimes called “Critical Social Justice” and the myriad negative effects it has had on our political environments, both on the left and on the right.”

“America’s True Believers and their Gutless Enablers” by Peter Savodnik. This article was from “Common Sense with Beri Weiss.” It’s absolutely brilliant, probably the best I’ve read on the subject. Here’s a snipet:

“We know who’s to blame for this surreality: the True Believers. The children of Park Slope and Echo Park with their graphic tattoos and nut allergies and an odd inability to form complete sentences. The neurotic, anxious twentysomethings who went to college to be told that “truth” is a white male construct, who seem devoid of poetry or irony, who believe mean words, words with which they disagree, are like ICBMs. Those whose lives are circumscribed by galactic reservoirs of ignorance — about the past, the culture, themselves, about why they believe what they know to be good and indisputable. Those who know only how to perform, and who rely on acronyms and slogans and logical fallacies when asked: how can you be sure of that?

But children are children. They can only be blamed so much.

The real wrongdoers are the Enablers. The so-called adults. The tech founders and college presidents and newspaper editors and museum directors and bank CEOs who pretend that the fight for “justice” is just. Who pretend that the “equity” crusade is about fairness and not about defending the grotesque inequality between those who have been trained to think correctly and those who have not.”

I couldn’t agree more. Savodnik also wrote this chillingly accurate essay, “‘Woke America’ Is a Russian Novel,” where he says, “The metaphysical gap between mid-19th-century Russia and early-21st-century America is narrowing.”

The following video interview with Boghossian is long, but I found it fascinating, especially with him being a liberal Professor from one of the most radically leftist universites in the U.S.  This video (and the other articles mentioned) are well worth taking the time to watch (and read). There is hope! There are new alliances being formed, but we do need to wake up, accurately understand what’s going on, and fight back against this perverse ideology however we can before it’s too late.

* All emphasis added.