Free Republic

Don’t apologize or defend yourself against vague accusations of “harm.” An apology when you’ve done nothing wrong is a lie. It will only further convince your accusers their delusions are reality. They don’t want dialogue; they want compliance. Nor will you defeat them in logical debate: Theory rejects objective truth. If you don’t fight this nonsense now, wherever it’s showing up in your community, soon there will be nothing good, true, or beautiful to defend. We will be ruled by lies and power while being told we’re progressing toward truth and justice. We’re in an open war, ideologically speaking. There...

...In this essay, I hope to outline a few factors that I think offer a partial analysis of how this societal virus escaped the university lab. I don’t really mean to be so narrow, though, as to insist that the university is the only relevant “lab” or to imply that the media and activists were merely vectors, as we shall see. Reaching back even into the 1960s, radical leftist thinkers, notably including the very famous Herbert Marcuse, were writing that a fusion between the radical outsiders, racial minorities, and leftist intelligentsia (itself a loaded and important term) were to...

The turn language is taking in politics calls to mind that controlling language to control thought was a prime goal of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s ‘1984.’Back in the 1990s, an adjunct English professor at Bakersfield College used to start first-day freshman composition by writing the F-word on the whiteboard in big capital letters. She’d then turn around and explain the word’s etymology, point out that its moral connotation was entirely a construct, and tell the students in no uncertain terms that any scandal they felt was due to their parochial ignorance. She would disabuse them of this...

SUMMARY Critical Race Theory (CRT) makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life—and do so with a degree of persistence that has helped CRT impact all of American life. CRT underpins identity politics, an ongoing effort to reimagine the United States as a nation riven by groups, each with specific claims on victimization. In entertainment, as well as the education and workforce sectors of society, CRT is well-established, driving decision-making according to skin color—not individual value and talent. As Critical Theory ideas become more familiar to the viewing public in everyday life, CRT’s intolerance...

District officials in San Diego evidently believe that the practice of grading students based on average scores is racist. [At the Reason article]: ...Under the new system, pupils will not be penalized for failing to complete assignments or even show up for class, and teachers will give them extra opportunities to demonstrate their "mastery" of subjects. What constitutes mastery is not quite clear, but grades "shall not be influenced by behavior or factors that directly measure students' knowledge and skills in the content area," according to guidance from the district. District officials evidently believe that the practice of grading students...

You may have heard the terms “Cultural Marxism,” “Critical Theory” or “Frankfurt School” bandied about. And while you might have an intuitive approximation of what these terms mean for America in the 21st century, there’s a good chance that you don’t know much about the deep theory, where the ideology comes from, and what it has planned for America – and the world. The underlying theory here is a variant of Marxism, pioneered by early-20th-century Italian Marxist politician and linguist Antonio Gramsci. Gramscian Marxism is a radical departure from Classical Marxism. One does not need to endorse the Classical Marxism...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—In a last-ditch effort to stop negative stories about Joe Biden and his family from spreading, Twitter shut down its entire social network Thursday. After seeing account after account tweet out one particularly bad story, CEO Jack Dorsey realized he had to take action. Dorsey smashed a glass box in his office reading "Break In Case Of Bad Publicity For Democrats." Inside the case was a sledgehammer for smashing Twitter's servers. "Red alert -- shut the servers down! Shut them all down!"

Leftists are outing themselves as racists complicit in perpetuating systems of oppression. Maybe it's time we started believing them. Black Lives Matter is the operational arm of “critical race theory,” the postmodern philosophy of “critical theory” applied to race. Critical theory suffers an inescapable epistemological conundrum. It’s the Liar’s Paradox: If a Cretan says all Cretans are liars, is he to be believed?Or, in the case of critical theory: If a theory denies objective or universal truths, claiming that the powers-that-be subconsciously construct “reality” by projecting their will to power onto the transcendent screen of axiomatic certainty, all to perpetuate...

I can’t take any credit for this idea as it comes entirely from James Lindsay. Wednesday he published his argument along these lines and it is more than 30,000 words long. So long that I’ve only read a fraction of it at this point but the gist of the argument is clear: Critical Social Justice has already encroached deeply into our public education system and halls of government in the United States. In fact, this trend is accelerating to a pitch so extreme that complaints that schools are operating in the service of political indoctrination rather than as houses of...

Acclaimed theologian Tim Keller recently addressed the issue of critical theory which has become popularized in some Christian circles. In a lengthy essay published at Life in The Gospel, the former pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan articulated the differences in the many theories of justice presently swirling in culture, including postmodernism. "There have never been stronger calls for justice than those we are hearing today. But seldom do those issuing the calls acknowledge that currently there are competing visions of justice, often at sharp variance, and that none of them have achieved anything like a cultural consensus, not...

It seems critical theorists won't stop until they've denied, rewritten, and scrubbed every semblance of Western Civilization from the education system. It started on July 5 when Nikole Hannah-Jones, who penned the lead essay for The New York Times’ 1619 Project, was trolled with a meme. The meme came from philosopher James Lindsay, whose upcoming “Cynical Theories” book on identity politics co-written with Helen Pluckrose is already an Amazon bestseller. Lindsay summarized the exchange: [I]t appears someone put this Woke Mini into the employ of satirically replying to Nikole Hannah-Jones on the fifth of July in response to her tweeting,...

If people are only racist or 'antiracist,' your ideology is easy to enforce after a certain point of proliferation because people believe it's bad for business to be on the side of alleged racism. “If you voted for Donald Trump, you are a racist. You have no wiggle room,” tweeted Jemele Hill on July 19. Hill is a writer at The Atlantic and the daughter of a Trump voter. While her contention might puzzle the average American, it would raise few eyebrows on college campuses, where racism and bigotry have been defined differently for years.Those expanded definitions, so broad they...

Is mathematics next on the chopping block to be deconstructed as a form of "Western imperialism"? A young woman describing herself as a teacher, Ph.D. student, and "social justice change agent," recently gained notoriety for tweeting, "The idea of 2+2 equaling 4 is cultural," a product of "western imperialism/colonialism." Yes, even mathematics, held up as the most objective and neutral of disciplines, is being reshaped by critical theory, which claims that all ideas are social constructions by groups using their power to advance their own interests. *snip* Critical theorists argue that mathematics is just another arbitrary human creation that has...

George Washington University is urging students to read Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same in an effort to educate them about the dangers of stereotypes and discrimination. The "Solidarity Resource Syllabus" released by the Washington, D.C.-based school's Office of Diversity provides students with a reading list that focuses on racism in the United States. Among the 126 books that the university says "actively and effectively … [combat] injustice" is San Francisco State University professor Robert Smith's 2010 book that equates conservative beliefs with bigotry. That label applies to all who subscribe to right-leaning beliefs, including...

The leftist rot has burrowed so deep into the timbers of the nation that it is moot whether it can ever be pumiced clean. The minions of the left -- unhinged academics, ignorant politicians, radical feminists, “social justice” warriors, global warmists, Deep State operatives, the Democrat party and similar political organizations throughout the West, media fifth columnists, the various agents of institutional culture, left-wing sans culottes, union syndicalists and metrotextual intellectuals... *snip* Where did all this come from? A starting-point is always elusive -- one recalls the lone provocative idea of deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, namely, that origins always recede. Was...

The Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) casts itself as a spontaneous uprising born of inner city frustration, but is, in fact, the latest and most dangerous face of a web of well-funded communist/socialist organizations that have been agitating against America for decades. The Black Lives Matter movement claims that only whites can be racists. And while justifying violence to achieve “social justice,” the movement’s goal is to overthrow our society to replace it with a Marxist one. Many members of the black community would be shocked to learn that the intellectual godfathers of this movement are mostly white Communists, “queers”...

... Mr. Sanders wouldn’t be this close to the White House if not for the complicity of Democrats and the liberals who dominate the academy and media. Rather than fighting the ideas that animate him and his millennial voters, they have indulged and promoted them. They created the political environment in which he could prosper. Consider the intellectual currents he is riding: • The attack on capitalism and markets. Like Tony Blair in Britain, Bill Clinton’s New Democrats accommodated the economic lessons of Ronald Reagan. By the Obama Presidency, all that had changed. The left blamed markets for the 2008...

Mary Grabar's book, 'Debunking Howard Zinn,' takes aim at the celebrated historian who is as influential as he is ideological and dishonest. Howard Zinn’s book, The People’s History of the United States, is one of the most famous American history textbooks ever written. His goal was to change the way Americans saw their own history by writing from the perspective of those he called “underdogs.” In doing so, he thoroughly distorts the true historical record and paints America as an inherently unjust nation.Mary Grabar believes that at the root of his agenda is a desire to see America turned into...