Critical Race Training is a cult and America needs to be de-programmed
It is sad to see how susceptible people are to Critical Race Training propaganda – although I suppose it’s not all that surprising. CRT is more than propaganda, of course. It functions more like a cult that is programmed through training, group think, and pressure (intra- and inter-personal).
CRT works on some of people’s better impulses as well as some of their worst: on guilt and people’s impulse to make amends for historic wrongs, on fear of being called racist, the desire to fit in, and techniques of brainwashing.
I know from personal experience how hard it is for most people to speak out against group pressure. Several times I’ve been in the position of speaking out (on other issues, mostly when I was in school) and each time I’ve done it alone although many people would come up to me privately afterward and say they agreed with me but were afraid to speak out publicly. And this was in situations considerably less fraught with peril than objecting to CRT in a job situation, for example. But publicly speaking out in that way is usually stressful and the social costs are high even if one’s job isn’t at stake (mine never was).
Roger L. Simon has this to say about CRT, and he doesn’t mince words:
Something called Critical Race Theory intervened to turn our society around, head it back toward racial enmity and, to be blunt, destroy our country, and with it our common humanity, unless it is stopped.
Unlike slavery, which was overt, CRT is a growing cancer infecting our schools, media, entertainment, and businesses. It is everywhere, often unseen and more often not even known or recognized by a large percentage of the public, so all the more dangerous.
Many definitions and explanations of Critical Race Theory exist, a literal phantasmagoria of intellectual obfuscation, the stuff of theses and “studies,” some of it quite brilliantly, if sophistically, executed, but CRT boils down to something quite simple.
Martin Luther King’s justifiably famous dream that the day will come when we judge each other by our characters and not by the color of our skins has been turned on its head.
I’ve said it was a cult. But it’s a cult that doesn’t talk about a deity or religion although it functions somewhat like a stern sort of religion that brooks no argument and demands unquestioning obedience. It also shares something with Nazism and Communism, although CRT is neither. That “something” that it shares is a view of the world that divides people into groups based on some inherent characteristic, and then rewards or punishes them on that basis. Show trials, pressure, and public confession are sometimes part of it.
The Nazis, like the CRT trainers, categorized people by race, although Nazis added nationality. Nazis developed a hierarchy of peoples around Europe, with Germans at the top and the rest subservient and even marked for slavery or death in some cases. The hierarchy they set up was far more complex and widespread than most people realize, and it was deadly serious (literally). That it was stark raving mad was no bar to their belief in it, their teaching of it, and their ability to implement it in the real world wherever and whenever they gained power and chose to exercise it. Here’s a very brief summary for those of you unfamiliar with what I’m talking about (much more at the link, including the hierarchy of countries and ethnic groups and how they were ranked for better or worse treatment by supposed degree of racial and cultural similarity to Germans):
Generalplan Ost was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Central and Eastern Europe. Implementing it would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale to be undertaken in the European territories occupied by Germany during World War II. It would have included the extermination of most Slavic people in Europe.
Soviet Communists based their own hierarchy mostly on class, although it wasn’t quite that simple.
The Nazis’ racial/ethnic theories and the Soviets’ class theories are reductionist; they pretty much are Theories of Everything, pretty much all you need to explain most of the complexities and mysteries of the human world. And they offer a solution (or at the very least an explanation) and proclaim that you are supposed to regard the purveyors of these “truths” as authorities. Protest is not just futile; it is dangerous. CRT shares these characteristics.
Nazism and Communism are among the most destructive ideologies the world has ever known. CRT is not the same, but I don’t think that Simon is exaggerating the damage CRT has already done and has the potential to do.
You may think I am being ridiculous by comparing it to Nazism and Communism. I can assure you it’s something I don’t do lightly. When people are grouped together by race or similar characteristics, excoriated and blamed on that basis for the ills of the world, called names, told to shut up if they want to disagree or protest, encouraged to publicly confess their sins (including thought crime) and to make amends, are shunned or punished and/or their livelihood taken away if they don’t agree, then you’re in cultland and if those dispensing this toxic theory ever come to full power you might be in even greater danger.
When you look at CRT from the outside in seems so insane and morally wrong that you can’t believe anyone accepts it. But with group pressure, they do – far more often than one might think.
The whole problem is seeing people as a member of a group and not an individual. If we could just get rid of that tendency in mankind we save ourselves a lot of trouble. I don’t know how to do that or even if it can be done. Hell, probably not. Some people seem wired to see others as members of a group.
Not only is it a cult, but one far surpassing in viciousness and in destructiveness those cults which are more familiar (Scientology, NOI, Rastafarianism, The Five-Percenters, etc) because it has captured so much of the culture and ensorcelled so many of the so-called “intelligentsia”. Under the guise of “anti-racism” (of which the race-hustler Ibram Kendi is The Grand Wizard, running an astonishingly lucrative racket from his sinecure at BU), the propaganda of BLM/CRT/1619 is nothing but a cancer metastasizing throughout nearly every institution, from K-12 and academia to MSM and even to The Pentagon. Far too few conservatives seem to have either the knowledge or the courage to wage battle against this pandemic, which is far, far more dangerous than COVID.
Yes, it seems to explain everything. You can’t argue against it. It’s not falsifiable. It creates suspicion, hostility, anger, self-righteousness, and hatred.
And Neo, your blog is superior, and I truly value you and your research and writing.
CRT is as dangerous as Nazism was in Germany. It is in ALL our major corporations, just as the German corporations (Gesellschaften) cooperated with the Nazis in power. It is clearly accepted by a large % of our population. Everyone, every business from Coca-Cola and Disney on down, is immersed in it.
Look at your TV commercials, full of social lies; about 50% of them show happy black families with fathers living in well cared-for homes, when we all know they are a mere 13% of the population, the largest source of fatherless children, and are educationally and economically our bottom-dwellers. Yet you will see on TV a Mercedes ad showing a happy beautiful black female driver! Just like us, right? NO.
If black, you need only a high school GPA of 2.5 to have the same chance of being admitted to Harvard as a white with a GPA of 3.9.
Merit has been cast aside for medical students in favor of sex (female) and race (black). My own school, the Univ of Rochester (NY) now admits 50% black females and 15% foreigners, leaving 35% of the slots for white American males in its battle against ‘systemic racism’, of which the school feels guilty.
The undereducated, the “grunts”, among us know the truth; it is the “educated” who live and perpetrate the lie of CRT.
junco:
Thanks.
I’m reading an interesting book, “THE WOKE SUPREMACY,” by Evan Sayet. He makes the same point you do, Neo. That CRT, cancel culture, and wokeness are all globalist philosophies like Nazism, Communism, and Muslim jihadism. Their goals are all similar – to control the world, and force all humans to adhere to their rules, which will bring about a utopia.
I have been wondering what the psychology is of people who buy into these global domination schemes. Sayet points out that the leaders are mostly narcissistic sociopaths who are capable of dreaming these grandiose dreams and believing them possible. He points out how the present cult of woke supremacists believe in the tenets of John Lennon’s song, “Imagine.” No private property, no borders, and no religion are the big ideas. It has all been tried before and always with devastating results.
The followers of these woke supremacists are mostly people who have no religious beliefs, no sense of the history of Western Civilization, and have low self esteem engendered by the trophies for all culture. Buying into these ideas give them a sense of doing something important – championing a high moral purpose. Those who are afraid to speak up about these dangerous and destructive ideas make up too much of the population. The leaders plus the true believers, plus those afraid to speak up makes it appear as if these people are a majority.
I think the book explains a lot about what we’re seeing. To me it has been as if half the population has suddenly gone mad. The book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” by Charles Mackay sheds light on the case as well. With modern communications mostly controlled by the left, I guess it’s not surprising that this popular delusion can spread so quickly. Their needs to be pushback and there is by you, Neo, and other communicators on the right. We have to keep it up. The future of millions of lives depends on it.
With mandates for “equity” and critical race training, the Biden administration is the most overtly, deliberately racist administration in my lifetime. The worst part about all this, besides its offensive and destructive nature, is that it doesn’t actually help black Americans.
Cicero, black families like those commercials are living in my neighborhood — including the Mercedes. At least one of them is a Trump voter.
Kate, my point was 13% of population is being portrayed in 50% of commercials. As if that were representative of the truth. But we can’t have Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben, can we?
The bottom dwellers economically cannot run out and buy a Mercedes.
That you have prosperous black neighbors is not the big picture, nor am I being critical of their success.
Community Organizing, as done from the 80s on worked through a less developed form of CRT. I’m kinda a crank on this and related subjects as I have seen and experienced what they are doing. My way of understanding this is that the Left is forming a new “culture.”
Cultures are, in my view, a complex set of internalized emotional reactions that a cultural group have in common. At the base there are emotional responses that are genetically “hard wired” in. These form the basis of what we call human nature. Culture is layered on top.
These responses are learned, usually in childhood, by seeing and aping the responses of those the child is around.
Brainwashing/indoctrination takes the same normal emotional learning and warps it to the desires of some leader or leaders who gain power by having a group that reacts emotionally as they direct to things the leader says are good or bad.
CRT has formalized this as the Left cult works toward becoming the main culture here.
Cicero, no, I didn’t think you were criticizing my neighbors and their successful lives. I don’t mind the commercials showing two-parent successful black families. That’s what we want! The unequal admission standards and racial quotas are another matter.
Narcissistic sociopaths are not amenable to reason nor congenitally able to reflect upon factual results.
They are humanity’s equivalent of ‘rabid dogs’ who act as a cancer, metastasizing through societies.
There’s only one cure for rabid dogs.
Rather than act when the damage is minimal, ‘civilized’ societies wait until only the deaths of millions can stop the ‘cancer’.
@Kate:
No we don’t want that. In the Ghetto they see these imaginary Wakanda families on TV and think either ‘Uncle Tom’ or ‘Stick it to Whitey, yo!’
Ask yourself how often you see a commercial showing a happy WHITE family these days? Not often, right? You might see happy Black, Asian, Mystery Meat of Various Ilk families, but if you see an actual person it’s going to be a mixed family and generally the mother will be white. Now dig deep into your psyche and see if you can figure out why that might be?
For that matter when did you last see a TV commercial showing a White Male Father as anything but a figure of scorn or fun?
But still… It’s OK to be White 🙂
@GB Yep.
Clearly leadership is sociopathic and opportunistic. Anyone who has been around the Managerialist Bugmen Class knows this type.
For the Woke Rank and File look to Spandrell’s Bioleninism model. The Left have built up an Army of Losers: Blacks, La Raza, Sexual Deviants, Midwit Whites who are too dumb to make it in the serious professions but think themselves too good to do real work in the real world, etc… All these Losers know that they have no place in a proper functioning world, so are committed to the destruction of the old world and creation of a new world where they will be on top.
}}} Unlike slavery, which was overt,
CRTPML** is a growing cancer infectingThere was a typo. I fixt it fer ya.
.
De Nada <—— Is this cultural appropriation? Ask me if I actually care.
P.S., two headlines for the times:
Floyd spurred broad push for change globally, activists say
Q: Who cares what activists say about their own movement’s success?
Charlottesville mayor’s poem about city, racism ‘hits nerve’
Translation: “I’m a pissed-off racist bitch, and you should listen to me whine from my position of power as mayor of the 15th largest city in the USA”
===========================
** PostModern Liberalism, as I have noted, is the true social cancer. CRT is merely one of its pathways to destruction.
OBH:
Minor correction: Charlottesville is a city located in Virginia. With a 2020 population of 46,786, it is the 14th largest city in Virginia and the 847th largest city in the United States.
The 847th!
All of Albemarle County totals only 111,000.
O Bloody Hell – interesting thought. I like it.
There was a Viva Frei interview with Gad Saad who is an evolutionary psychologist. He wrote “The Parasitic Mind” that defines the mindset that allows PLM/CRT. I intend to check it out and read it.
What I ascribe it to the rejection of God and his eternal truth. If there is no hell there is no consequence for what you do on earth today.
https://www.amazon.com/Parasitic-Mind-Infectious-Killing-Common/dp/162157959X
These people are totalitarians. Use Mussolini’s definition on them and ask them if they agree with it. “Everything Within the State, Nothing Against the State, Nothing Outside the State”. If they say they don’t then hit them with examples like the mask mandate, vaccine passport or if it should be mandatory. Ask them do they agree with those propositions.
Change is a process and not a moment.
@Spartacus:
“[Leftward] Change is a process and not a moment.”
There… fixed it for you.
Lasting Rightward Change requires Discontinuity.
What works for Them will not necessarily work for Us.
Just ran into this VERY interesting post in Ace of Spades about CRT and the pathology of those who practice it. I highly recommend it. I really wish we could post a picture on this thread. The graph says it all.
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=393329
Good summary of Bioleninism here:
https://thewardenpost.net/bioleninism/
“Cult” in the post title inspired me to see if Rick Ross, the most well-known cult deprogrammer, was on the case at his website, https://culteducation.com/group.html .
Ross is all over QAnon, Proud Boys and white supremacy, but nothing for CRT.
I wasn’t surprised. There certainly is a place on the web for cult education, but Ross and his crew of commenters grind their axes with zeal and are on the cultish side themselves.
I was on his website for a while. I won too many arguments, including with Ross himself, so he blocked my login, then sneered, after I stopped commenting, about how I must have gone into hiding.
“I won too many arguments, including with Ross himself, so he blocked my login, then sneered, after I stopped commenting, about how I must have gone into hiding.”
Sounds like Rick Ross has created a bit of a cult around cult deprogramming.
If I were Rick Ross, I’d update my branding with “Meta is Better ™”.
Re: Change…gradual or discontinuous?
I am Spartacus, Zaphod:
I’m reminded of the classic Hemingway line about going bankrupt: slowly, then quickly.
However, lately I’ve been wondering how we (the West, anyway) came up with the Enlightenment in spite of strong opposition from Monarchy and Church.
When I was younger, I was a sort of Whig — I believed progress towards liberty and enlightenment was inevitable. I’m less sure today. Now I’m surprised we got as far as we did and face the possibility we could backslide a frightening amount.
Was it a fluke? If America drops the ball, who will pick it up?
@Huxley:
The Enlightenment is over-hyped, IMvHO:
Kenneth Clarke’s Civilization Episode 4 esp. see Federico da Montefeltro, 1st Duke of Urbino:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxRGQzUOyhk
One of the best episodes of the entire series.
Enlightenment Over-hyped in the sense that we are meant to believe that all was darkness, intolerance, and boring old wars of religion before it.
Also, Donatello’s David.
Re: Bioleninism…
Zaphod:
Interesting. Rick Ross’s site is somewhat like that. The commenters are mostly broken people who justify themselves and find comfort by hating cults and the people in them.
When I started to re-engage with Landmark Education, I went to Ross’s Cult Education site for balance. I was already aware Landmark was cultish, but they (and Werner Erhard who put it together) have such a great line of patter I was curious to check it out again.
So you could say I was Landmark by day and Rick Ross by night. I made some trouble for Landmark too, but they shrugged it off. The Ross people were different … venomous. I came away with the conclusion that Landmark was healthier than Rick Ross’s Cult Education.
I completed the three core Landmark programs for Self-Something-or-Other, satisfied my curiosity and left.
Re: Enlightenment…
Zaphod:
Hmm. There is something smug about Liberal Enlightenment thought — remember Fukuyama’s “The End of History”?
Still, to find myself battling for basic freedom of speech in the 21st century, when the censors are not Kings and Popes, but other Americans shocks me. CRT might be tougher to fight than the 17th century Vatican.
@huxley:
Just had a quick look at Landmark Education. Looks at first glance like a Benign Managerialist Bugperson Secular Religion Lite. Which means I’ve already run afoul of Day 1 (iv) The Vicious Circle (I think I may have prior form here, hehe…).
But positivity sells, and it’s the kind of thing that cannot hurt one if it shows up in one’s social media permanent record — in fact just coincidentally displays Trait Openness in a way so obviously that even the retards who end up working in HR and Recruitment can’t miss. What’s not to like? 😀
Cynicism aside, looks like could be helpful to many people and unlikely to be the cause of much harm in the world.
Benign Managerialist Bugperson Secular Religion Lite
Zaphod:
Not bad!
There was a progressive criticism of est/Landmark that it basically trained one for fitting into corporations and producing results. Which is a feature, not a bug, when pursuing a corporate career, which I was.
est/Landmark also pushed Creating Your Reality and Not Being a Victim to absurd lengths. Some people got into trouble that way. However, it really conditions one to keeping agreements and not blaming other people and things. It’s a boot camp and CRT America could use that boot camp today.
The programs themselves could be called participatory theater which packs a real epistemological punch. When Erhard switched from est to Landmark, he incorporated so much Heidegger, it could be called Applied Heideggerianism, which I found fascinating.
@Huxley:
I was a young and impressionable lad from the boondocks when I first read Fukuyama’s book. Didn’t know much of what I didn’t know… but I do recall thinking something along the lines of “Sir, put down that Hegel *slowly* and step away with your hands raised!”
Somehow I grokked that people smarter and far more educated than I was were initiates in some kind of cult.
Had to look up EST as never swam in these waters. Started at the top and wasn’t surprised further down the Wikipedia page to find out that the Scientologists had been at Erhard for stealing ideas.
Unnerving though it may be, the confrontational approach must be be helpful — Socrates goes Speed Dating — what bothers me is the power it grants the Confronter and any audience. Sam Vaknin seems to have arrived at something similar (Cold Therapy) for bringing Pathological Narcissists to self-awareness.
Zaphod:
Yes, Erhard studied Scientology for a while (as well as Zen, Dale Carnegie, and Third Force Psychology). So some Scientology showed up in the est Training. Scientology declared Erhard a Suppressive Person and set about attacking him.
A reporter, who was also a Scientologist, got to Erhard’s daughters and obtained suggestive testimony that Erhard had abused them sexually. The tapes were played on “Sixty Minutes” and El Supremo Werner departed quietly to Mexico and other points foreign. (Last I heard he lives in the Cayman Islands.) He is no longer mentioned in Landmark programs. But his brother and sister run the organization, so Werner is no doubt pulling some strings.
Werner was an abusive SOB, but I don’t know about the daughters. They have recanted their claims and blamed the Scientologist. Still, if you are selling oneself as a great teacher of Life, having daughters willing to rat you out on national television is almost as bad as the accusations.
The entire human race is in a cult.
My wife is a permanent resident… she doesn’t want to become a citizen because it would mean no where for us to go… But if she retains her citizenship to her country, i can leave with her as a spouse and settle someplace safer…
and you thought my saying investing in ovens was a sad joke not a sarcastic indication of where the train with no brakes (and which is fueled externally) is heading….
Your watching the power of Gliecshaltung in action… as the nation is forced to align even if they dont agree…
Median Household Income and Share of Births to Unwed Mothers by Race in 2019. See Any Patterns?
https://twitter.com/Mark_J_Perry/status/1375441283527942151?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1375441283527942151%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoonbattery.com%2F
I mentioned that demographic collapse would harbor the end of the remainders
This past Friday’s edition of the Chicago Tribune wrote an article on Chicago Public Schools (CPS) entitled “In the name of progress, CPS faces past names.” By “past names” it meant going down the list of schools within the district and seeing if the person in which the school is named after had any traces of what can be deemed as racist (i.e. slave owner, slave trader) and to rename them.
One school, Agaissiz School, named after Louis Agassiz, was put on the list.
The Tribune writes –
“An eight-grader student at what will now be known as Harriet Tubman Elementary in Chicago said she’s proud the school was just renamed for an abolitionist.
‘The pure and righteous work of Harriet Tubman to liberate Black people from the gross evil of American slavery is ultimately remarkable because of the viciousness of the white slaveholders,’ the student told the Chicago Board of Education on Wednesday, before members voted unanimously to approve the name change.
Her school was named after racist scientist Louis Agassiz, who placed white people at the top of a discredited intellectual hierarchy and called African-American people a ‘degraded and degenerate race.’
People are still ‘forced to suffer from the fabrication of Western European pseudo-scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries who created the social construct of race to rationalize their greed that supported gender bias to validate their masculinity,’ she said.”
The student’s words are an odd mixture of the racial and gender ‘education’ going on in CPS. I’d argue that her words aren’t exactly her own words; like a 12 year old preacher not understanding scripture but pontificating on a pulpit. What the student and article leaves out is context. Without going full scholar, a Google search would lead one to Britannica where “degraded and degenerate race” appears. A quick read through the Britannica article tells us that Agassiz’s belief, more or less, stemmed from the concept of polygenism, where he concluded that different races of humanity “each descending from different ancestors (polygenism) and originating in separate zoological provinces at the beginning of time,” alongside the creating an intellectual hierarchy based on the size of ones cranium (whites had the largest, so hence they’re at the top, where blacks had the smallest so they’re on the bottom), and his experience in at a hotel observing unruly African-American servants. These are all controversial views but the Tribune article does not put them in historical perspective of underdeveloped sociological and anthropological theories, just that it was “racist.” It’s the old tactic of looking at the past with modern eyes.
Despite this Agassiz, being religious, believed men were created equal and that through education and morality men would be equal before God. Agassiz was a biologist, paleontologist, and physician, amongst other things, contributing less controversial ideas and concepts to each field, but it’s only concluded that he was a racist pseudo-scientist.
Sources:
https://fossilnews.org/online-content/louis-agassiz-a-wider-context/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Agassiz/Activities-in-the-United-States#ref322652
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Agassiz#Polygenism_&_Racism
Harriet #$#@ing Tubman again. That’s the best they can do?
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CRT is totalitarian thought control and terrifying for its implications since dissenters often and do lose their jobs and are shunned. I’m hoping this is a mass hysteria that passes soon but there are no guarantees. People have to resist in large and small ways.
Diversity dogma (i.e. color judgments), not limited to racism, denies individual dignity, individual conscience, intrinsic value, and normalizes color blocs (e.g. “people of color”), color quotas, and affirmative discrimination. One step forward, two steps backward.
But who deprograms the deprogrammers?
“But who deprograms the deprogrammers?” – huxley
Quis docet ipsos magister?
Doesn’t have quite the same ring. “Teacher” was as close as I could get to “programmer” in pre-computer Latin. Any grammatical errors resulted from just copying Google Translate; all I know about Latin I learned from the internet.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?