Erasing Naivete

 

Somehow, I have gotten behind in everything.  I’m behind at work.  I’m behind in blogging.  And I’m woefully behind in summer reading… and it’s not even July 4^th yet (Is July 4^th still a thing?).  I just picked up Lawrence Wright’s new book, The Plague Year.  Wright is a talented writer who, like Lionel Shriver, never disappoints.  I like The End of October and God Save Texas and I’ll be interested to read his take on this past year.

But before I set sail on Wright’s journey, I’m going to spin out a few of my own observations—more like surprises, I’d say, as we weathered pandemic and the social unrest of the past year.  Listening to one of Bret Weinstein’s podcasts a few weeks ago, I was struck by one of Weinstein’s quotes, “No matter how cynical I get, I find that I am still naïve.”   I’m with you on this one, Bret.  I suppose the first big surprise has been my own naivete. I mistakenly thought of myself as prudent and appropriately skeptical, but the past year showed that I fell far short.   Here are a few of the areas in which I was taken by surprise.

 

·        I wholly underestimated the number of tyrannical politicians and government officials.  As a bit of an amateur U.S. history buff, I have been fascinated by the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers, the writing and thinking of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Jay and Hamilton.  I understood the need to constrain government and the propensity of people to abuse power.  But I mistakenly thought that people raised in America with American ideals and values would exercise some restraint.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  With the COVID19 as their pretext,  the Governors Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, and J.B. Pritzker steamrolled the individual liberties of their citizens.  Under the rubric of “flatten the curve,” religious liberty, freedom of association, freedom to travel all got flattened.   As I write this, J.B. Pritzker just extended yet again the 30 day “emergency” with no input from the legislature as COVID19 is receding.   Even worse, was the power grab of the Administrative State—the CDC putting a halt to evictions and Anthony Fauci basking in unelected and unaccountable power.

 

·        The reciprocal of the power grab has been the submissiveness of the American people.  This was a nation founded on rebellion and disobedience.  Yet, we witnessed a great deal of blind obedience to dictates that were not founded on empirical evidence or actual science.  Early on, we learned that there was very little risk of transmission out of doors.  Gyms and restaurants stayed shut with no evidence that they were incubators.  Still, people yelled at other people across the street and admonished them to mask up.   And I still see people walking around downtown Chicago alone, with masks on.  Even more ludicrous are people biking or driving alone with masks on.   I was astonished at how many citizens meekly submitted to their government… and how many turned into willing enforcers.   One day, I was at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop, and inadvertently stepped about a foot over the spacing line that was taped on the floor.  A rather rotund, 260 lb. woman immediately gave me the death stare and wagged her finger at me.  She promptly ordered 3 doughnuts and a coffee with cream and sugar.  I could not resist, “If you’re serious about the risk to your health, you might want to rethink those doughnuts.”  Needless to say, I was hit with a barrage of expletives.

 

·        The third surprise was the collapse of higher education.  It was merely a dozen years ago that I read Jonathan Cole’s book The Great American University in which Cole made a wonderful case, extolling the excellence of America’s university system.  The American university system was the one area in which public and private institutions ran in parallel and made each other better.   He cited Columbia University and The University of Chicago as the best of the best because of their core curriculum requirements.   But fast forward a dozen years and the university system has quickly devolved into a network bloated wokeness indoctrination camps.  Even at the University of Chicago, wokeness has overtaken the school.  The heralded Booth School of Business is now running “white privilege” and “unconscious bias” workshops (with no empirical evidence that such a thing exists).  The English Department announced that it would only admit students interested in Black Studies in its graduate program next year.   The university launched an investigation into economist Harald Uhlig for evidence of “racism” because he had the temerity to assert that BLM was wrongheaded in its demand to defund the police.  And the university is contemplating establishing an entire department devoted to Critical Race Theory.   This is happening all over the country.  Harvard admitted activist David Hogg, who couldn’t get into a number of 3^rd rate schools.  Princeton just deleted its Greek or Latin language requirement for classics majors because it’s not “inclusive” enough.  Yale stopped offering its Western music class for the same reason.  The university system is now leading the way in the illiberal push.  Schools that once taught critical thinking are now purveyors of doctrinal orthodoxy… and overly expensive ones at that.

 

·        Finally, there is the corruption of media.  Media outlets always had a tilt, but now they are engaged in propagating straight falsehoods and distortions.   Donald Trump did not refer to the white supremacists at Charlottesville as “fine people.”   Nicholas Sandmann was portrayed as harassing the old Native American when it was actually the reverse.  Officer Sicknick was not killed by a fire extinguisher during the January 6 protests.  The summer of rioting, looting and burning was ludicrously referred to as peaceful protesting following the death of George Floyd.  The New York Times ran off Bari Weiss with her resignation letter becoming a sort of modern day Declaration of Independence.

 

(https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter)

From the false assertion that Trump urged people to drink fish tank cleaner to its failure to follow up and ask incisive questions about the Nashville bombing or the Las Vegas shooter, or what the mayor of Moscow’s wife was paying for when she wired $3.5 million into Hunter Biden’s account, the media as become corrupt beyond repair.

 

These developments and the depth of the corruption and decline in higher education caught me by surprise.

Maybe they shouldn’t have.

FAIR enough

 

As the Woke ideology consumes more and more of our formerly venerable institutions and corporations, those of us that value a liberal society are seeking refuge and camaraderie with like-minded individuals.

I think I have found one such organization—The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism or FAIR (www.fairforall.org).  I was initially attracted to it via a tweet from exiled journalist Bari Weiss and another tweet that called it a “non-woke ACLU.”  And it has an interesting and diverse array of public intellectuals as supporters and contributors—Bari herself, Columbia’s John McWhorter, Brown’s Glenn Loury, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Melissa Chen, among others.

I attended the FAIR Loving Day Celebration, marking the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia that knocked down miscegenation laws.  The event was organized by Chicago Chapter co-leader Takyrica Kokoszka (an African American) and her husband, Larry (white), both teachers in the Chicago Public School System.

Here are some of the highlights:

·        Several people talked about the loss of friends over Wokeness and feeling alone.

·        One person alikened FAIR to a “secret society” which I echoed, referring to similar secret societies in the writings of Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Benda in Community Czechoslovakia.

·        A born Brit that expressed his shock and dismay that free speech was under assault in the U.S.

·        Another University of Chicago educated woman that talked about her devotion to principles of free inquiry that she adopted at U of C that are now being threatened.

·        A woman physician that talked about her family’s experience as Holocaust survivors and her revulsion at the fact that she now is considered “privileged.”   She also talked about CRT invading her profession and interfering with her ability to take patients as they are.

·        Another gentlemen talked about his desire to “defund the universities, not the police.”

·        When one gentleman introduced himself as a U.S. history teacher, someone joked, “Which one?” (reference to 1619 Project.)

·        There was a woman from the old Soviet Union and a woman from Poland that were able to talk about what life in those societies were like.

·        A highlight for me was actually getting to spend some time getting to know Takyrica, a bright, enthusiastic, optimistic woman with a winning smile.

But here is the real punchline:   I did not detect any real partisanship in the room.  Of approximately 50 people in the room, I could not reliably predict the party affiliation of any of them.  Most spoke about free speech and the indoctrination going on in our educational system.  There was not a single mention by anyone of Trump or Biden.  That fact alone filled me with hope.

The next day, I listened to the full interview of Bari Weiss, one of the founders of FAIR, with Jordan Peterson.  Weiss, a self-proclaimed left of center journalist, said “I really believe that the fight for liberalism (I don’t mean that in the partisan sense but I mean that in terms of the values we’ve been describing in this conversation), that is more important than any amount of popularity, any amount of accolades on Twitter, than anything  else, and so I had to leave the institution in order to fight for liberalism, and that I see as the mission of my life.”

Conservatives and libertarians like me need to join hands with “liberals” like Bari Weiss, just as blacks must join hands with whites if we are to defeat the forces of illiberalism.   We cannot remain on the sidelines as our institutions fall one by one.  FAIR, I think, is a great step in the right direction.

I urge you to join and to listen to Weiss’s entire interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFTA9MJZ4KY)

 

Another Institution Falls to CRT

 I am stunned at the speed with which Wokeism has taken control of many of our institutions.   On the national level, it has inserted itself into the N.B.A., MLB, and the N.F.L.  Many major corporations have allowed it to infect its operating system—Bank of America, United Airlines, Coca-Cola, Gillette, to name a few. 

But locally, too, the movement has swept through our not-for-profits and educational institutions like wildfire.   The new American Writer’s Museum went from a special exhibit featuring Laura Ingalls Wilder and a live performance of readers of Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to featuring an obscure transgender author alongside Kathy Griffin in just a few months.  The Newberry Library went from a celebration of Herman Melville to sponsoring Drag Queen Story Hour and launching a vigorous campaign to rid the city of Columbus Day.  The University of Chicago, the originator of its laudable Free Speech Principles, shut down admissions to its graduate English Department to all but Black Studies scholars. 

Most troubling is the grip it is now asserting over our primary and secondary school system, threatening to indoctrinate young minds with its pernicious creed.  James Lindsay has brought to light its overt strategy, comparing it to a virus that hijacks its system to self-replicate.  In The Parasitic Mind, author Gad Saad similarly asserts that Wokeness and CRT acts as a parasite, infecting its host and sucking the life out of it.  

And now it has infected the local Jesuit High School, Loyola Academy.   Imagine the horror and revulsion of the caring, devout Catholic parents that sacrifice to scrape up the $16,000 per year to ensure that their son or daughter receives an education aimed at forming the whole person as a responsible, family and community oriented citizen, only to wake up and find that he or she is being shamed for the color of their skin and subjected to a large BLM sign (whose stated objectives are the destruction of the nuclear family) now proudly displayed in the school.   A large group of parents, dismayed and angry, has formed an opposition group to oppose the teaching of CRT in the school, has put up a website and is organizing a campaign to attempt to put a stop to it. 

While I share their dismay and anger and I am very sympathetic to their cause, the parent group  faces an uphill battle to expunge CRT from the school.   The Loyola administration has turned itself into a hardened target.  The parents opposing CRT are trying to persuade the administration to hearing them out—they are playing the Persuasion Game.  The school’s administration has already foreclosed that—it is now playing the Power Game,  not the Persuasion Game.     It is not persuadable.

In order to stand any chance of successfully dislodging the poison of CRT, the parent group will need to decide how close to the Buzzsaw they wish to get (See Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying’s Dark Horse Podcast #82 5/29/21 – Avoiding the Buzzsaw)—being maligned as “racists,”  otherwise smeared in social media or canceled.   The propagators of CRT know this.  Parents do not want to put their kids in the crosshairs of controversy during their high school years.

To start with, they will need to do two things: recognize and acknowledge that outgoing Father McGrath was a terrible steward of the school, and they must be willing to litigate.

McGrath cannot be seen as a reasonable or positive actor in this drama.  His primary job as leader of this institution is to educate and train young men and women to become critical thinkers, to lead a Christian life as “men and women for others,” to foster a “Loyola community” and to be cognizant of, and prepare against, the threats that institutions like Loyola will face in the future.

McGrath has failed miserably in his most essential tasks.  Under his aegis, the school has been torn apart.  There is no Loyola community anymore. 

By permitting CRT to take root in the school, McGrath allowing intellectual and emotional abuse of these young men and women.  This is substantively no different than the sexual abuse that was endemic in Catholic institutions and he is responding in the same fashion—stonewalling and setting up impenetrable defenses.

McGrath has manipulated the board of trustees, shrunk it to rid itself of dissenters (apparently using some “emergency” bylaw provision.  He has engaged PR firms to deal with this.   The sympathetic column written by Clarence Page was clearly arranged, with Page declaring it a “tempest in a teapot.”  It is not that.  It is a fundamental battle over whether Loyola students are going to be intellectually abused.  McGrath’s quote in Clarence Page’s column is revealing, stating that he seeks critical thinking about race.  CRT does NOT welcome critical thinking about race.  It does not tolerate dissent from its views.  Already, other Woke parents are labelling those that oppose CRT as “racist.”  No apology for this has been forthcoming from those parents or McGrath.

McGrath correctly identifies racism is a sin.  But McGrath does not offer any evidence at all that racism has been an issue at the school.  Specific incidents of racism should be dealt with on an individual basis, just as Rocky Wirtz, president of the Blackhawks did when 2 fans made racist comments at a black player.  They were summarily removed and permanently banished from the United Center.   Loyola, it appears, is and has been a very welcoming place, a place where black, Hispanic, Asian and white kids can all thrive. 

I would advise the parent group to watch the film Spotlight to see what they’re up against with respect to the Catholic Establishment.  In that case, it was the sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese.  Here, it is emotional and intellectual abuse that McGrath is welcoming into the school.  In addition to the documented “white shaming” that he has permitted to go on, he has permitted a large Black Lives Matter banner to be prominently displayed in the school.  In addition to be led by avowed Marxists, BLM is anti-law enforcement (“What do we want? Dead cops.  When do we want it? Now.”),  antisemitic, and its mission is explicitly anti-family and has no inhibitions of using violence to achieve its ends.  It belongs nowhere near an educational institution, much less a Catholic one.  Moreover, he ignores its real aims—to displace a free and liberal society borne out of the Enlightenment with a Marxist one.  McGrath has demonstrated that he has not followed Ibraham Kendi very closely, nor has he become acquainted with the writings of CRT’s progenitors—Michel Foucoult, Antonio Gramsci, or Herbert Marcuse. 

Further, McGrath fails to understand that Wokeism and CRT are antithetical to Catholicism.  Intellectual leaders such as Douglas Murray, Bret Weinstein, John McWhorter and others have correctly identified it as a new religion, complete with its own scripture and clergy.   It is a religion that will compete with Catholicism.  By embracing CRT, Loyola is no longer a Catholic school.   It is a Woke school.  Over time, they cannot coexist.  The Kairos retreats, which dealt with the development of the individual and spiritual growth will now focus on race—and the oppressed and the oppressors. 

McGrath (and the board of trustees) needs to be called out for what he is and what he has done to this once fine school.

What to do?   I don’t have a dog in this fight.  My children are long gone.  My interest only is in pushing back against this insidious intellectual abuse of children.

I know what won’t work.

Withholding donations won’t matter much.  While Mr. Purcell’s loud withdrawal of support is laudable, organizations that have been taken over by Woke and CRT have shown that they really don’t care as long as they can hijack the organization for their purposes.  Even if half the funds dried up, and Loyola reduced its enrollment by half, the CRT crowd consider it a victory—a North Shore school pumping out Woke teens. 

Letter writing won’t work.  One writes to persuade and this administration is well beyond that.

The only path to satisfaction---and there is only one that I see—is through litigation, carefully orchestrated with a skilled PR firm.  This administration will do nothing until costs are imposed on it.   I have identified at least four potential claims that could be made against the school and there may be more.   The litigation needs to be coordinated with a PR firm.   McGrath has apparently employed one.  The parents need one to even the playing field.  The parent group has done a good job of documenting the abuse on their website (kidswinloyola.com) but they will continue to get stiff armed and outflanked by an administration that is determined to shut them out, and treat them with contempt.

The parent group should take a cue from one of the New Jersey girls that lost in the state finals to a transgender athlete.  She is suing, making it very public and has launched a very public campaign on social media to promote her cause.  A girl is Oklahoma likewise has filed claims because she was dropped from her volleyball team because of her political beliefs.  And we all know that Nick Sandman of Covington would have languished after being demonized by the media until he filed claims against the media giants. 

In addition to filing claims and engaging in a public PR battle, they should demand access to classrooms, especially those classes of teachers that they know are teaching and promoting CRT.  Knowing they are being policed may help curtail the indoctrination.

The Catholic Establishment knows how to defeat dissent and deflect charges of abuse.   It is very skilled and has a great deal of resources at its disposal.  The parents group will need to re-think its strategy if it does not wish to be ground down.

Another institution has fallen.  If it can be restored at all, it will take a tough, bruising, and expensive fight to restore it.