The Struggle Sessions Are Here, And They're Not Going Away
By: John Daniel Davidson (The Federalist)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The left's multi-decade project to teach everyone that America is irredeemably racist has led to the emergence of a new regime in American life. By John Daniel Davidson By John Daniel DavidsonJune 4, 2020
Amid the scenes circulating on social media this week of protesters and rioters and burned out storefronts and police barricades, two of them stand out as harbingers of what all of this means for the future of mainstream American society.
The first was a video clip of a small group of white people kneeling down before a group of black people. A white man at the head of the kneeling group was praying, his voice shaking with emotion: "Father, we ask for forgiveness from our black brothers and sisters for years and years of racism, of systematic racism."
The second was a clip of a large gathering in the affluent DC suburb of Bethesda, Maryland. Nearly a thousand protesters, most of them white, their hands raised as if in prayer, engaged in a kind of collective woke sermon, repeating after a man on a microphone: "I will use my voice in the most uplifting way possible, and do everything in my power to educate my community. I will love my black neighbors the same as my white ones…"
More than the rampant looting and the street battles, more than the clashes between police and protesters, these scenes of white people genuflecting in mass public affirmations of their own guilt is the key to understanding where all this is headed.
The model at work here is the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with its mass "struggle sessions" in which anyone deemed insufficiently sympathetic to the proletariat, or thought to have an excessively bourgeois lifestyle, was subjected to public humiliations, paraded through the streets, assaulted, denounced, and put on display as objects of scorn. Often these struggle sessions ended in false confessions and pleas for mercy.
Obviously, no one in America is being paraded through the streets against their will. But by rushing to profess their supposed guilt for racism, these people are admitting that they need publicly to affirm their allegiance to woke identity politics. This represents nothing less than the emergence of a new regime in American life. What is now a voluntary and seemingly spontaneous public affirmation of progressive ideology will in time become a requirement. If you want a career or a public platform or a professional life in mainstream society, you'll have to profess allegiance to the cultural left.
Here's How The New Regime Will Work
Already, we see examples of how this will play out. This week, Sacramento Kings play-by-play announcer Grant Napear, who has called NBA games since 1988, resigned after tweeting "ALL LIVES MATTER" Sunday night in response to a question from former Kings star DeMarcus Cousins asking him for his take on the Black Lives Matter movement.
Within days, Napear had also lost his popular sports talk radio show. He later issued a public apology to the Sacramento Bee. "I'm not as educated on BLM as I thought I was," Napear said. "I had no idea that when I said 'All Lives Matter' that it was counter to what BLM was trying to get across."
No matter. For the sin of being insufficiently woke about BLM, Napear's career is over.
You don't need to stretch your imagination to see how this process might repeat itself in the future, and on a mass scale. Anyone with a job in the public eye or even a significant social media following who doesn't publicly affirm the ideological preferences of the Left might be subject to similar treatment. To a certain extent, this is already the case.
And it has been a long time coming. What we're seeing now is the result of a decades-long project on the left that is now bearing fruit in American civic life. That project has perhaps found its fullest expression in the New York Times' 1619 Project, which takes as its starting point that America was founded to protect and preserve slavery, and that the American constitutional system is the source of our society's ills, foremost among them being racism.
That is, America as such is the root cause of the evils that now beset us, and it is America as such that must be transformed in order to right the wrongs of the past. And if you don't get on board with that transformation then you probably won't have a place in the new America.
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist.
Copyright © 2020 The Federalist, a wholly independent division of FDRLST Media, All Rights Reserved.
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Orwell warned us!
Trump is off topic
He warned us that people would try to lie to us while seemingly telling the truth. I think that is why this article is good material for the memory hole.
Yes, he did and he told us of their "newspeak" and authoritarian rule!
Warning: All animals were created equal, but some are more equal than others
Yes, some get the front page if anything bad happens while others hardly get a mention, and some get to loiter at Starbucks while others may not and some have a great chance of going to college with a B average over those with an A average.
I'd say George Orwell understood the progressive ideology fairly well.
Very sad to see. Conform or be punished.
You guys are paranoid. There is no liberal conspiracy. It is just the workings of a fevered imagination.
How do I know? Any person who has a problem with this statement definitely has some paranoid issues, as well as some racial issues:
Don't you see anything in this article that's hitting home with you? I found it to be a pretty good description of what we are seeing and have been for last ten years.
Not Really. I have difficulty getting beyond the first assertion:
There is no "left" as such, any more than there is a "Right". That is just a clunky piece of nomenclature, not an organizational chart. Certainly, no group would even posit such a disturbing thesis. Take out the irredeemably and it starts to sound less like a madman's dream. Change it to America is systemically and implicitly racist and I might even agree. But one has to know what that means before one can discuss it.
It really just sounds like somebody trying to scare (and thereby, control) people into believing without thinking that this mysterious force called the left is out to , I don't know, steal your baby's or something equally sinister.
It is highly likely Grant Napear was lying when he said he didnt know "All Lives Matter" was distasteful to black activists. Athletes in that area say Napear has made racially questionable comments before. And in fact, some people say "all lives matter" just to provoke and aggravate BLM sympathizers. The idea being that some whites cannot bear the thought of black lives getting special attention, even if it is only within a slogan. Napear fits that mold.
If you can't admit that white racism is 95% of the nation's racial problem, then this is the seed for you. It is a form of white grievance along the lines of "what more do these (people of color) want?"
You mean racial hatred generated by white progressives? Ya, I'd say it's a big part of our problem.
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Racial hatred is a problem. So is systemic racism, which is different.