Surveying the urban war zones, property destruction and the shuttered and bankrupt businesses across so many American cities from lawless rioters and extended Covid-19 shutdowns imposed by feckless political leaders, many wonder, “Just how did we get here, and will we ever regain normalcy?” Those two questions loom over the November election, but what’s really at stake is a choice between civilization and chaos.
What most people don’t realize is that there is an ideology behind Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the Democratic leadership that empowers BLM, and it’s called Critical Race Theory CRT).
Critical Race Theory
On the eve of Labor Day weekend, when President Trump became aware that CRT had infiltrated many of the agencies of the Federal bureaucracy through the reporting of Christopher Rufo on the Fox News--Tucker Carlson show, he issued a directive that all Federal agencies cancel race-related training programs based on “critical race theory” (CRT).
It turns out that CRT education and training programs have been promoted throughout various federal government agencies through the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, which came into existence from President Obama’s 2011 Executive Order 13583. His stated purpose was to “Establish a Coordinated Government Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce,” and he amped that up in his last six months in office, perhaps to institutionalize his legacy. In July of 2016, he rolled out the “Inclusive Diversity Strategic Plan,” calling on Federal agencies to “fully utilize policies, programs, and systems that support inclusive diversity through increasingly focused, innovative, and accelerated communication and learning strategies.”
To make sense of all this it’s important to recognize that diversity and inclusion were already well established in the Federal Government long before Obama’s 2011 executive order. At that time the percentage of blacks and minorities in the Federal workforce was about 18% and 34% respectively, a disproportionately larger representation than in either the civilian population or the private sector corporate work force. By the end of the Obama Administration, the percentage of minority representation in the Federal Government was even higher. Thus the 2016 initiative was probably less about expanding diversity and inclusion than about indoctrination—the “focused, innovative, and accelerated communication and learning strategies,” for government personnel—which is where “critical race theory” comes in.
Critical race theory is a derivative of critical theory which made its way into America by leftwing intellectual immigrants from the “Frankfurt School,” who were neo-Marxists forced to flee Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s. Luminaries from the Frankfurt School included Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkeimer, Eric Fromm and Wilhelm Reich, who set up shop at Columbia, Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard, New School for Social Research and Brandeis. In the 1970s Harvard Law School Professor Derrick Bell applied critical theory to legal theory, and his 1973 book, Race, Racism and American Law became the first primary text on critical race theory (CRT)—giving birth to the CRT movement.
But it looks like 2020 will resemble 1860 as the year in which the November election represents a crucial internal test
Critical theory and CRT are not like traditional theories limited to explaining and understanding certain areas of human motivation and behavior. Rather, critical theory is activist-oriented and emphasizes political organizing. Many of its advocates think of themselves as revolutionaries whose primary purpose is to critique and transform society as a whole. In short, critical theory is a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy.
CRT advocates downplay the accomplishments of the civil rights movement and generally reject rights-based remedies, such as affirmative action, color blindness, role modeling and the merit principle. They attack the very foundations of the classical liberal legal order that includes equality theory, legal reasoning, rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law, and they specifically oppose neutral rules, such as one-person/one-vote or voter ID requirements. CRT advocates don’t believe the law itself is a neutral tool, but rather part of the problem, structured to oppress minorities, while preserving white supremacy. No wonder some want to tear it all down.
Prior to Trump’s directive, compulsory CRT seminars and training were going on in the U.S. Treasury Department, NIH and Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). CRT’s influence invariably brings on mission creep and distraction and can turn agency management on its head.
Consider FBI Director Christopher Wray who clearly has his hands full straightening out his agency. He was probably unaware of the weekly seminar training going on in the J. Edgar Hoover headquarters on the CRT subcategory “Intersectional Theory.” Intersectionality reduces people to being part of a network of racial, gender, and sexual orientation identities that “intersect” in diverse ways that determine the degree to which one is an oppressor or is being oppressed. With Chris Wray being an Ivy League white guy at the top of the FBI pyramid, “intersectionality” adds a whole new dimension of leadership complexity.
In a free society fringe groups and extreme ideologies can and do appear, and one would hope that the American people and their government representatives would have sufficient judgment and ability to withstand most contradictions and absurdities. But it looks like 2020 will resemble 1860 as the year in which the November election represents a crucial internal test, the failure of which could prove the undoing of the United States as a constitutional republic.
Surveying the urban war zones, property destruction and the shuttered and bankrupt businesses across so many American cities from lawless rioters and extended Covid-19 shutdowns imposed by feckless political leaders, many wonder, “Just how did we get here, and will we ever regain normalcy?” Those two questions loom over the November election, but what’s really at stake is a choice between civilization and chaos.
What most people don’t realize is that there is an ideology behind Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the Democratic leadership that empowers BLM, and it’s called Critical Race Theory CRT). 
