It’s true that politics is downstream from culture, but there is also a symbiotic relationship between the two—they influence each other. While the left is diminishing our freedoms through the long arm of government, they are also assaulting them through the culture and obliterating traditional values and institutions. The Democratic Party embraces cultural extremism and institutionally advances it through legislation that codifies new cultural norms. Cultural influences also threaten our liberties beyond the political arena.
Political forces are impotent to stop or even slow most of this cultural corrosion, much less reverse it. Political correctness, even when operating solely within the private sector, is a suffocating suppressor of liberties. Social media giants, from Facebook to Google to Twitter to Instagram, have enormous power, including the unchecked prerogative to regulate speech within their sizable platforms. Leftist vultures hover over every digital acre of America waiting to pounce on conservative commentators and denounce their “hate speech.” They lie in wait for any business or industry to support causes they oppose or oppose those they support. They aggressively target Christian businesses that deviate from their secular dogmas, organizing boycotts and judicially harassing those who don’t toe the leftist line on same-sex marriage.
Corporate America displays a shocking cowardice in the face of leftist bullying. Just recall Nike’s disgraceful cancellation of its plans for patriotic sneakers featuring the Betsy Ross flag due to objections from former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Nike got cold feet about introducing its Air Max 1 USA shoe after Kaepernick claimed the flag symbolizes slavery.44 If the left can so easily intimidate our biggest, richest corporations, imagine the pressure it brings to bear when it targets a small Christian bakery45 or a mom-and-pop convenience store.46
The left has waged war on our culture for decades and conservatives have been losing ground, sometimes because they haven’t suited up for battle. In recent years, leftists have gained momentum at an alarming rate. The left controls our education system, Hollywood, the mainstream media, social media corporate giants, and the rest of Silicon Valley. Its monolithic voice floods American culture, indoctrinating generations of Americans with progressive propaganda. Conservative counterattacks are disorganized, lack strategic coherence, and are simply overwhelmed by the left’s tireless determination to radically alter our culture and impose their values on us. Unless we fight back more effectively on both fronts—political and cultural—we won’t be able to save America.
One of the left’s many conceits is to anoint as “woke” those who profess to be down with the struggle against alleged racial, gender, and economic discrimination. But being “woke” means being aware, and the left may well be aware of many things that simply aren’t true. As Ronald Reagan famously said, “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”47 To be “woke” to falsehoods is to be asleep to the truth. But leftists aren’t asleep to the reality that the culture war is ongoing and gravely serious. And it’s time conservatives “woke” up from their complacency.
GROUNDS FOR OPTIMISM
We deny at our peril the gravity of the threats we face. Will patriots remain mindful of the urgency of these threats? I believe they will—because of their passionate love for this nation and their unwavering dedication to preserving it for their children and their descendants.
Indeed, despite our beleaguered condition, there are reasons for optimism. Trump’s election signals that America is finally coming to its senses and patriots want to fight back. Americans didn’t elect Trump because he’s a celebrity entertainer or because we are bigots, as alleged. Quite the opposite is true. Trump didn’t arise in a vacuum. He is not the cause of our nation’s division. He didn’t start a groundswell movement behind new ideas he was articulating. Rather, he rose to power as a direct result of existing divisions and because establishment Republicans had failed to impede, let alone reverse, the leftist juggernaut.
Under Trump’s leadership, conservatives have made great strides toward turning the tide, but progressives are not taking these countermeasures sitting down. They have tenaciously redoubled their resolve to destroy Trump and disable his presidency. Each time they are thwarted, they regroup and re-attack. We must understand that we are locked in a perpetual struggle against relentless opponents and resolve to fight them with equal or greater force.
Our task is enormously difficult. Some conservatives don’t want to admit that some of our own fellow Americans, wittingly or unwittingly, are working to change America into something our founding fathers wouldn’t recognize. But we mustn’t grow numb to what the modern Democratic Party has become.
Some discount the severity of the threat because they believe only part of the party has gone over the starboard side into the deep end. Nancy Pelosi and others from the old guard are battling AOC and her fellow travelers for control of the party, but that fight is more about power than ideology. Some commentators think otherwise—that if the young Turks would just settle down, the old guard would bring the party back to the center. Columnist Niall Ferguson, for example, opined that the Democrats will lose the 2020 presidential election because “they are not one party, but two: a liberal and a socialist. The former can beat Donald Trump—but not if it is associated with the latter.”48
I believe Trump has a very good chance of being reelected, but not because the Democrats are two parties. Nancy Pelosi and her ilk are certainly more circumspect about their leftist views and would probably take us on a slightly slower path toward socialism if they had their druthers—but they would take us there nevertheless. All twenty-plus Democratic presidential candidates favor socialized medicine, healthcare for illegal immigrants, draconian environmental measures, and the balance of the far-left agenda.49 Though Pelosi dismisses the party’s AOC wing as merely “five people,” AOC and her cabal control the narrative, and seventy Democrats have voted with her 95 percent of the time.50 Not only are they committed believers in socialism, but their hold on power depends on greatly expanding the dependency cycle, including to illegal immigrants. Recall that no less an establishment Democrat than Hillary Clinton based her presidential campaign on a promise to amplify President Obama’s decidedly leftist agenda. Ferguson is correct, in my view, that the Democrats will commit political suicide if they embrace AOC’s “campus socialism.” But regardless of whether they nominate an openly socialist presidential candidate, they’ve already played their hand, and it’s clear they will pursue a radical agenda if they win the presidency or regain full control of the legislative branch.
The 2020 presidential and congressional elections could determine whether this country heads permanently down the dark road of socialism, cultural Marxism, and eventually totalitarianism, or returns to its founding freedom tradition. We must work for the reelection of President Trump and congressional conservatives to reverse this leftist assault on America. To prevail in this war for our nation, which we did not start but have a moral duty to fight, we must present our message more clearly and expose the destructiveness of progressive policies and politics, which requires us to understand the left’s thinking and why it is so inimical to the American idea. To that end I have written this book.
CHAPTER TWO The Victimhood Hierarchy
INTERSECTIONALITY
Progressive activists and their acolytes are bitter and suspicious, always urging people to be wary they’re not getting cheated and to ensure they haven’t accidentally offended someone and lost their good standing. How can this be healthy? How is it consistent with the American dream? How can it promote prosperity? When you’re consumed with paranoia and resentment instead of focusing on bettering yourself, you’ll never get past the starting block. It’s hard to be constructive when you’re always angry. Obsessive victimhood stifles personal growth, and those who foist it on others for political gain or in a personal quest for significance do great harm. Encouraging people to think of themselves solely as members
of identity groups instead of unique human beings promotes the soft bigotry of low expectations and perpetuates the very racism and other “isms” that the left purports to condemn.
Today the left exhorts people to dwell on their own race, gender, and sexual orientation along with their group’s alleged historical and current oppression. The oppressed are empowered by their identities, and whites, men, and heterosexuals are deemed incapable of understanding their experiences and must be silent and listen.
Historically, most studies of identity groups focused on a single topic, such as race, gender, class, disability, or sexual orientation. But the current trend among leftist scholars is to examine how people are marginalized and endure multiple oppressions based on their multiple identities.1 This concept of “intersectionality,” like many of the left’s absurd social theories, began in academia. It establishes hierarchies of victimhood based on combinations of the victims’ disadvantages—race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and others. It is a matrix to determine where one fits on the hierarchy of victimhood and privilege. Women, for example, are subject to patriarchal oppression; black women are also subject to racial discrimination, and black lesbian women are victims of heterosexual oppression as well. The more disadvantaged identities you have, the more protection you are afforded. Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in a 1989 paper examining how black women are marginalized by both anti-racist and feminist advocacy because their concerns transcend the individual groups.2 Intersectionality seeks to form social justice coalitions between different identity groups who can unite to resist discrimination.3
As both black men and white women are more privileged than black women, Crenshaw declares, the person who is both female and black has multiple burdens and is marginalized in both feminist theory and anti-racist politics. “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated,” she writes, arrogantly dismissing the relevance of any sort of analysis but her own. Or, as writer Jennifer Kim puts it, “If I’m a black woman, I have some disadvantages because I’m a woman and some disadvantages because I’m black. But I also have some disadvantages specifically because I’m [a] black woman, which neither black men nor white women have to deal with. That’s intersectionality; race, gender, and every other way to be disadvantaged interact with each other.”4
Intersectionality, then, focuses on different types of oppression and how they overlap and are exacerbated if working in combination. Kim says it’s important for people to understand this in a time when more companies are paying attention to diversity and inclusion but tend to focus on the specific disadvantages of women or minorities instead of the impact of multiple disadvantages. People are encouraged to advocate for various causes—women’s rights, gay rights, racial equity, disability rights, immigration, and more, but they must always do it through the “lens of intersectionality.” All oppressed minority factions must see themselves as allies on intersectional issues, which will lead to self-empowerment for all these respective groups.
WOMEN WITHOUT VAGINAS
Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality was embraced on college campuses and weaponized for political effect. In her book Introducing Intersectionality, Mary Romero explains that intersectionality is focused on social inequality. It “provides analytical tools for framing social justice issues in such a way as to expose how social exclusion or privilege occurs differently in various social positions, and it does this by focusing on the interaction of multiple systems of oppression.”5 “Class alone does not explain all aspects of poverty or housing segregation,” writes Romero. “Gender alone cannot account for wage disparities and occupation segregation. Race by itself does not provide a complete understanding of health disparities or college retention rates. Intersectionality, as an intellectual project, delves deeper into the nuances of social equality by pushing researchers to analyze the various manifestations of inequality.” Additional “power systems” and their impact on social identity and economic status must also be examined. These power systems include sexuality, ableism, ethnicity, citizenship, and age.
The study of intersectionality is mainly in the field of sociology. One of its political benefits is that the topic is so broad it can be applied to many different situations. For example, Romero uses intersectionality to examine parenting and childhood, social inequality, life experiences on campus, and other issues.6
In practice, intersectionality tends to devolve into a hectoring set of rules that must be strictly followed when applied to political issues or when even talking about them. For example, in another piece by Kim, she identifies mistakes people should avoid while celebrating Women’s History Month or when discussing women’s issues. The first mistake is knowing just part of the history—it’s great to know that women got the right to vote in 1920 with passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, but of course you must recognize that female racial minorities got their voting rights much later. Second, it’s unacceptable to discuss women’s issues without acknowledging the effect of race, ethnicity, ability/disability, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, class, etc.… And third, you must not exclude transgender women and gender nonconforming people when discussing women’s issues. That means you must avoid language that is “cisgendered,” which is a term the left manufactured to denote the 99 percent of the population that identifies as the sex they were born. Naturally, instructs Kim, we must retire the “pussy hats” popular at women’s marches, which exclude transgender people. After all, not all “women” have vaginas.7
A DOWNGRADE FOR FEMINISM
Amusingly, intersectionality has created huge problems for progressives, as aggrieved groups jealously compete for the top rung of the victim hierarchy. This has created particular challenges for feminists. Consider Patricia Arquette, who proclaimed during her acceptance speech for the 2015 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, “To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.” That may sound like boilerplate feminism, but leftists furiously pounced on Arquette for failing to invoke racial minorities—that is, for callously treating women as one homogenous group without acknowledging the hierarchy of disadvantages.8
In a piece titled, “Patricia Arquette’s Spectacular Intersectionality Fail,” Andrea Grimes denounced Arquette’s sins against intersectionality. Grimes says she initially thought Arquette’s statement was “a nice thing to say,” but something about it “didn’t sit right.” On further reflection, she concluded that “Arquette thoroughly erases gay women and women of color and all intersecting iterations of those identities by creating these independent identity groups as if they do not overlap—as if, ahem, ‘all the women are white, all the blacks are men.’ ”
But that wasn’t Arquette’s worst sin, says Grimes. She demanded “that ‘gay people’ and ‘people of color’ fight for ‘us,’ a group that Arquette has specifically identified as non-gay and not of color—as very specifically straight and white and ‘woman.’ ”9 Horrors! Grimes remarks that while white women experience stark wage disparities, the gap between the earnings of white women and white men is smaller than for any other group—except Asian-Americans. “That means white women as a whole do better in terms of wage equality than almost any other group. Got it?”
Grimes ends by admonishing feminists not to protest against intersectionality as being too divisive, which is a favorite ploy of those who pretend that “doors don’t close behind straight white women after they’ve walked through them.” In other words, straight white women have made strides in overcoming discrimination, and they must assist other disadvantaged groups in overcoming oppression.
Making people hyperconscious of their va
rious “identities” inevitably stirs resentment among groups and encourages people to keep score along identity lines, rather than to view other people as individuals and unique human beings. Indeed, intersectionality has created a host of troubling contradictions, especially for traditional feminists. In fact, the current leftist notion of gender ideology largely abolishes the entire concept of gender, recognizing only negligible differences between the sexes and insisting that gender is not biologically determined but is a matter of personal identification. If you’re a man who really feels you’re a woman, then as far as the left is concerned, you are a woman, and all of society must recognize that fact. This leaves no basis for women’s pride or women’s rights, since there is no objective criterion anymore for defining what a woman is. This problem is starkly illustrated in the growing phenomenon of transgender athletes who are biologically male competing in women’s sports. When traditional feminists protest the unfairness of biological women having to compete against biological men, they are denounced by the left for disrespecting the transgender experience.
Fortunately conservatives reject intersectionality, so we don’t have to exhaust ourselves worrying that our every utterance or action may infuriate the Intersectionality Police. But this is a real problem for traditional feminists. This tension is reflected in a Washington Post column by Christine Emba, in which she acknowledges that the feminist movement has delivered gains but questions whether it is for all women or just those in the middle class. She notes that feminism’s intersectionality critics use social media hashtags such as #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen to shame feminists who seek the advancement of only one, relatively privileged group—middle-class white women. Emba cites the Arquette dustup as an example of mainstream feminism’s heresy of being insufficiently inclusive.
Guilty by Reason of Insanity Page 4
