In a fabulous interview four years ago with Mark Steyn, James Mitchell, the man (in)famous for waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, presented a pearl of wisdom gleaned through one of his interactions with the terror mastermind:
A theory that considers itself impervious to criticism is not worthy of universal acceptance.
We’d like to thank Richard Malaby for this Op-Ed. If you have an Op-Ed or LTE
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I asked [KSM] one time, “Why do you guys call this the ‘Religion of Peace’ when all I ever see you do is kill people and blow people up?” and he said, “We are the Religion of Peace. The world will be at peace when there is a Muslim caliphate in charge of the entire world and everyone has either been converted, killed, or enslaved, so we’re spreading peace. We are the Religion of Peace.”
“Eliminate all opposition, and we will live in paradise!” Quite the rallying cry. The Germans had a term for this phenomenon: Gleichschaltung, or the consolidation of all political and cultural organizations under one administration; in their case, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, commonly known as the Nazi Party.
The Nazis passed laws with benign names such as the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, but which had the monstrous effect of removing Jews from government jobs and public positions such as judges, teachers, and professors.
You have to crack a few eggheads to make an Aryan omelet, and while history has proven that voters will support those who promise the world, it is the elimination of others that typically makes the masses queasy. Hence, Joseph Goebbels leading the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and his ability to control all newspapers, books, films; the Nazification of information; the dehumanization of an entire race through cultural pressure.
According to Goebbels, people would believe any lie if repeated often and loudly enough. National solidary to the state ideology would marginalize and crush any dissent.
This brings me to Critical Race Theory (CRT).
No ideology has seen its popularity skyrocket over the past few years like CRT, a philosophy based on the theory of white supremacy, the idea that white people enjoy certain tangible and intangible benefits due solely to their race. It is an intoxicating ideology as it excuses the performance of certain groups in particular societal metrics and it plays to the guilty conscience of certain white people, allowing them to repent of their inherent racism and appear virtuous to others.
For the past year, Americans have watched Black Lives Matter, the manifestation of CRT and the logical conclusion of its premise has held protests in over two thousand towns and cities in every state.
Statues of men whose opinions or actions do not comport with current pieties have been pulled down. Names of sports teams, government buildings, and even private companies and mascots have been discarded.
Flip on any sporting event and there are sure to be athletes taking a knee or raising a fist. Big businesses rush to fight racism publicly. Movie stars, singers, and other celebrities seem to take masochistic pleasure renouncing their privilege.
Unsurprisingly, plenty of politicians are content riding the wave of civil unrest, happy to parrot the slogans of the day. Perhaps more distressing is the fact that there is no serious public objection to this theory. Through public education, college down to grade school, students are now being taught CRT and white privilege as gospel.
It is ubiquitous, everywhere, and at all times. Everyone agrees.
What if, rather than being “a racist country founded on slavery,” America was the first country where slavery was under attack from the moment of its founding?
Why did slavery exist on every inhabited continent and in every civilization for thousands of years until western civilization ended it?
How come our founders included language to abolish the slave trade in Article 1 of the Constitution? When America ended the practice in 1808 per the Constitution, how come the biggest advocates and beneficiaries of the slave trade were African and Middle Eastern countries?
It is often claimed that “slavery built America.” No one can or would deny that chattel slavery was a blight on humanity and that it served as the primary form of labor on southern farms and plantations, but America was broke after the Civil War. If slavery is the foundation for the current American economy, how come, as of the 1870 census, our gross domestic product has increased around 12,000%? How come the area that utilized slave labor is the poorest in the country?
Additionally, it is often stated that blacks in America lag behind whites in household income and other economic factors because of a “legacy of slavery,” essentially the “equity vs equality” argument: because blacks have not been free as long as whites, because they are discriminated against, they are economically trapped behind whites unless the government intervenes. If such is the case, since Haiti became independent in 1804 as the first “Black Republic” and the first country to abolish slavery, its blacks “should be the most prosperous blacks in the hemisphere and American blacks the poorest, if discrimination is the overwhelming factor, but in fact, the direct opposite is the case.
It is Haitians who are the poorest and American blacks who are the most prosperous in the hemisphere – and in the world.” How come?
Further, the media often highlights black-white gaps in education, income, crime, and so on. Rarely is it mentioned that Asians outperform both blacks and whites in all these categories. Would it be more appropriate to call America an Asian supremacist country, or fair to conclude that Asians oppress blacks and whites?
Whites have much higher rates of death by suicide and drug overdose than other racial groups; utilizing CRT logic, would anyone in good faith claim that whites are being oppressed? Or are these simply disparities between large groups?
How come blacks made unparalleled economic gains after emancipation, sometimes surpassing whites, but have experienced a sharp increase in unemployment, welfare participation, and the like since the 1960s?
What if, rather than being a racist hellhole, America is the best place in the world for anyone to live, regardless of race? Why do we have millions of people living here, illegally, by choice, and why do millions more try to immigrate to the United States every year?
These are simple questions, but they are rarely asked.
It speaks to the media’s hammerlock on information distribution; while they may claim that all Black Lives Matter, they are a bit more discriminating with particular Black Voices.
Sadly, many would rather prostrate and accept a popular, profoundly uncritical theory based on collective identity; those who reject CRT and believe in the antiquated notion how it is self-evident that all men are created equal are, paradoxically, fingered as racists and vaporized.
When we capitulate to an ideology that claims all its detractors are evil, we forfeit our ability to scrutinize its most basic flaws. Rather than infantilizing all blacks as victims of a racist society, it would seem more prudent to celebrate their remarkable achievements in far worse circumstances, and to explore why there has been regression since The Great Society.
Simply recognizing this fact will require immense courage in the face of a mob that feels moral superiority in spite of its historical ignorance.
