Calls for white people to “decolonize your bookshelf.” Cutting off family members and friends who are not down with the revolution. Suggesting neighborhood watch programs be reconstituted to focus on white racism instead of crime. These are a smattering of the insane cultural Marxist talking points being promoted in major so-called “mainstream” media outlets since the death of George Floyd.
Reading Is a Political Act
“If you are white, take a moment to examine your bookshelf. What do you see? What books and authors have you allowed to influence your worldview, and how you process the issues of racism and prejudice toward the disenfranchised?” One Juan Vidal asks this in an article for taxpayer-funded NPR. “Have you considered that, if you identify as white and read only the work of white authors, you are in some ways listening to an extension of your own voice on repeat?” he continued. “While the details and depth of experience may differ, white voices have dominated what has been considered canon for eons.”
What a poverty it is for a grown adult to have such a self-diminishing view of great literature. Obsessed with racial grievance, Vidal, who states that he is Latino, lumps legendary authors who happen to be white together as if they were nothing more than identical cans of soup on a supermarket aisle. Can he really not savor the grand panorama of human creativity presented by the likes of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, or Oscar Wilde, to name just a few, simply because these immense talents happen to have had a similar skin color that must not be overlooked in the angry name of racial resentment?
Is there no room to celebrate art as a reflection of humanity? Must we examine everything beautiful or inspirational in the world from the narrow lens of social grievance? For the progressive cultural revolutionary, the answer is yes.
Disavow Family, Spy on Neighbors
From this all-consuming ethos it is a short hop and a skip to total immersion in a perspective that will not brook the slightest disagreement with its own righteousness. The New York Times ran a stunning op-ed by Chad Sanders, who informs us he is a black male, in which he demands actions by white people that he says “may seem grave” but are necessary to combat racial injustice. Among them is disconnecting from family members and friends who do not share the enlightened vision he is espousing. Sanders tells white people concerned about racism that they must send text messages to “your relatives and loved ones telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.”
So here we have the duty to engage in right think and the need to disassociate from those who don’t measure up. What comes next in the cultural Marxist playbook? That would be community enforcement against those who will not go along with the agenda. The San Francisco Chronicle has this one covered. In a chillingly authoritarian news article posted in the political section of the paper’s website, Chronicle “Senior Political Writer” Joe Garofoli lists how white people can join the fight against systemic racism. “Community advocates suggested some ways to start,” Garofoli wrote. “Hold other white people accountable” is a subsection highlighted in bold font. George Orwell, here we come.
“That can start by transforming neighborhood watch groups into something different, said Zach Norris, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in San Francisco,” Garofoli wrote. “Law enforcement organizations often describe those neighborhood groups as ‘the eyes and ears of the police,’ Norris said. ‘But people have more than eyes and ears. We have hearts, we have minds.'”
The article then explains how community message boards should be self-policed by residents for “coded racist language.” Amazingly, the largest newspaper in one of America’s leading cities is calling for citizens to watch over and report on their neighbors’ hearts and minds in the name of racial justice.
A crucial facet of the power dynamic at work here is the relegation of one class of people to a lesser moral plane. Billy Maddalon, a columnist for The Charlotte Observer’s editorial board, wasted no time in establishing the rule. It was his lead sentence. “This is directed at white folks like me. Black folks will correctly find it inadequate,” Maddalon wrote in a June 7 piece brazenly titled, “It’s up to us, white people, to fix this now.”
Another NPR piece, authored by Ari Shapiro, a host of the network’s flagship All Things Considered program, echoes the broken white folks theme. “For white people who have just recently recognized their own complicity in America’s racist systems and are looking to ‘fix’ that — it’s not going to happen overnight,” Shapiro writes. He then proceeds to interview Robin DiAngelo, author of a 2018 book titled White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. DiAngelo incredibly states that being a decent person does not wash away the original sin of white racism. “Nice, white people who really aren’t doing anything other than being nice people are racist,” DiAngelo told Shapiro. “We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place.”
Dire Warning From Recent History
There is a word to describe that last sentence. It is Maoist. And it is at the core of every example we have detailed. More Americans should familiarize themselves with the horrific nature of communist China’s Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. An entire generation was spiritually and physically destroyed by a tyranny so complete that it controlled all aspects of everyday life. Every personal interaction, even within the family unit, was subject to the all-encompassing “no neutral place” of the revolutionary struggle.
The Guardian’s Tania Branigan in 2013 wrote a harrowing account of a “son’s guilt over the mother he sent to her death.” Zhang Hongbing was 16 when he denounced his mother for speaking ill of Chairman Mao Zedong:
Then, one evening, her zealous son accused her of tacitly criticising Mao. The family row spiralled rapidly: Fang called for the return of purged leaders and attacked Mao for his personality cult. “I warned her: ‘If you go against our dear Chairman Mao I will smash your dog head,'” Zhang said, at times reading from his father’s testimony. “I felt this wasn’t my mother. This wasn’t a person. She suddenly became a monster… She had become a class enemy and opened her bloody mouth.”
Is this the nightmare coming to our nation very soon? There are a frightening number of Americans who already subscribe to the same “everything is political” and “you are either with us or you are a poison that must be eradicated” mindset that ran wild in Mao’s madhouse some 50 years ago. It is disturbing beyond belief that many are employed by the biggest media organizations in our country.
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Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
