Today we're going to build off of last week's DivThu that was focused on the CNO, Admiral Giday, USN.
We are going to tie in the connection between Critical Race Theory, Antiracism, and Marxism - topics everyone is talking around for reasons best explained by them if you can get them to actually answer a question.
If you missed last week, click here and read it, watch the videos, then come back,
We'll leave last week at the House, and go to the CNO in the Senate in this remarkable exchange with Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).
The CNO did not answer the question. He just repeated talking points from last week. He brings up unrelated topics ... as if Kendi's work has anything to do with critical thinking, China or Russia.
No other side contra to Kendi's world view is on the reading list that one can reference to have a discussion about the issue, or "think critically." There is no balance here at all. The CNO has chosen a side. He has become political on a domestic issue, dragging his Navy along with him.
The CNO has read Kendi, I'll take him at his word, and by all indications is a true believer. Hoist that onboard and accept it. I have.
From here on out it is important to remember that when the CNO uses the words, "racism" and "equity," he does not define it as you and I do - but as Kendi does,
In his book,"How to be an Antiracist," Kendi defines racism as;
Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalized racial inequities.
Next, equity:
Racial equity is when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing. An example of racial equity would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner occupied homes...
Apply that concept to nuclear power school, medical schools, as well as biathlon and NBA teams. You can only get there by using a 1920's KKK definition or race married with strict quotas.
That is the remedy being injected right in to the veins of our Navy.
What a shame. Many (D) oppose the Navy because a larger Navy was a Trump thing, and as such it must be opposed and resisted because orange man bad. Now we have many natural allies of our Navy on the (R) side not all that sympathetic to other issues the CNO may bring up because in word and action, the Navy now seems the most woke of all the services.
Then again, maybe not. Perhaps we have a savior.
Then this Wednesday we had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, USA up in the House.
Again, we have unrelated talking points that clearly show that they do not know what they are reading, if they have read it in full. Mostly the Chairman and CNO sound like they are just repeating what their briefers from the DOD/DON branch of the diversity industry told them. "White rage?" That isn't in Kendi, and wasn't about the events of 1/6/21. There are all sorts of strange defections here. Watch it yourself.
He brings up Mao, Marx, and Lenin. Huh. Funny he should say that.
I want to bring to your attention a 4-minute segment from a podcast by Jonah Goldberg from last week. You can listen to the full podcast here if you want, but this segment from ~the 16-20 minute mark are germane.
Here's the transcript;
“The Ibram X. Kendi, I think that’s his name, the foremost guy in this anti-racism stuff. That’s basically, if that is what we are calling Critical Racism theory, right, which is that, this anti-racism thing that it doesn’t matter wether if you don’t bigotry in you heart, that if you don’t affirmatively support what he and his milieu of activists define as anti-racist policies, then you are objectively racist.
And, people keep asking why does this has anything to do with, why do people call this Marxist, actually I was had a long conversation with my wife about this the other day. To the extent it draws on Marxism, which it does as a matter of intellectual history, even though I doubt one in a thousand people who talk about Critical Race Theory as a good thing could explain to you what its roots in Marxism are, but it goes back to this idea of Material Conditions that is in Marx and a lot of Marxist thought.
It’s very much like this anti-racism stuff in this way. It used to be Marxists when they had their conferences or gave their speeches or whatever, that would say, “It is objectively true that…”, right, and they would argue that, “it is objectively true” because they liked to use the phrase “It is objectively true..” because it conjured, it drew upon the myth that Marxism was scientific. This has nothing to do with one person’s opinion or a contest of values, they always liked to steal authority on the cheap by claiming it was scientific.
That’s largely gone now, but instead what’s left is this same sort of Marxist argument they used to make which is that if you were not with the program of the communists or the socialists or whatever, and you had a point of view that wasn’t for the revolutionary overthrow or radical revolutionary transformation of society, then you were objectively on the side of the ruling class, the aristocracy, the industrial class or what Randy Weinegarten called the ownership class.
That’s where this whole thing about class consciousness comes out of in that is where you are part of the proletariate, the working class, the lumpen proletariate, all those kind of things, once you achieve class consciousness, once you actually see the exploitation inherent in the system, then of course you will act in solidarity with the other members of your class for the overthrow of the established order, and if you don’t agree with all of that, then you are objectively on the side of the oppressors.
So that’s the psychological-rhetorical trick that Critical Race Theorists use or at least Anti-racist theorists use when they talk about race insofar that they say that we have a monopoly on the truth. We have a monopoly on what constitutes racist policy and not racist policy and if you don’t affirmatively side with us in pushing anti-racist policies, and philosophies, and ideas, then you are objectively on the side of racism and it doesn’t even matter whether you are personally racist, because you are on the wrong side of the defining Material Conditions of how society is organized.
That would be wrong enough and bad enough except for the fact that because most of these people don’t actually understand that that they are mimicking Marxist arguments, they take it an step further in they say that not only are you on the side of racism, but you must actually be a racist in your heart if you disagree with us."
Interesting times we find ourselves in. You were warned here every Thursday.
UPDATE: Highly recommend everyone take a time to listen to or read the transcript of the recent Hugh Hewitt interview with Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) on Chairman Milley's comments.
UPDATE II - Electric Boogaloo: This Solzhenitsyn quote seems germane.
“And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.”
Milley may have read Marx, Mao and Lenin, but he hasn’t read our Constitution. First he fails even a basic understanding the 3/5 clause (which he incorrectly states treated blacks as 3/4 of a human) or why it was even contemplated in the first place. He sounds like a 19 year old college J school major. Hearing him speak about “critical thinking” while demonstrating absolutely zero of same would be laughable if he didn’t hold the position he does. This kind of stuff sometimes makes we want to Split S right into the ground.
While I TRY to read your blog often, for military insight that is hard to garner, you are way off the mark here. You are swimming upstream. You and your co-believers, who are numerous, may well succeed in your retrograde aims, in the short term, to our considerable detriment . In the long run you will be forgotten.
“We need critical thinkers in the Navy.” Amen. It is a critical resource when engaged with sailors who are monoracial, monocultural, monosex, have been subject to rote political indoctrination, who freeze, at all ranks, in critical situations, do not have the neural components to make real time decisions, and may well panic into every man for himself behavior under stress. Our enemies might well match our superior technology with sheer number; that’s a strategy. What they fear the most, however, is the superiority of our training and motivation.