RUTHFULLY YOURS

Over at Instapundit, Professor Glenn Reynolds is often the master of the pithy phrase that captures the essence of the political moment. Yesterday Reynolds wrote that, while the Democrats are trying to make everything in this election (and in life) about race, “Trump’s making clear that it’s about people who are constructive, productive, and generally happy, vs. people who are destructive, parasitic, and generally miserable, and that that difference transcends things like race.”

Have things really gotten so bad that the entire Democrat/Biden campaign has become the coalition of the “destructive, parasitic, and generally miserable”? Well, you can start with the protesters/rioters/looters/arsonists who have been endlessly destroying businesses and neighborhoods in major Democrat-run cities for the past three months. Yes, those people are “destructive, parasitic, and generally miserable”; and of course, every one of them intends to vote for Biden. And if you think that the conduct and attitudes of those people are somehow not representative of the Democrat/Biden coalition, ask yourself who in that coalition has been willing to come forth to strongly condemn them. The answer is no one.

But for today, let’s move beyond the riots and violence that have been dominating the news cycle, and look at what’s going on in the regular run-of-the-mill precincts of progressive/Democrat Biden-voting monoculture — places like woke corporations, the art world, and academia.

For our corporate example, consider the case of Sandia National Laboratories. It is a private company, but 100% federally funded, working mostly on designing nuclear weapons. If you think that such a corporation would not be a likely place for progressive indoctrination and orthodoxy enforcement, you would be wrong. An engineer working at Sandia by the name of Casey Peterson, along with some hundreds of his colleagues, recently got sent by the company to get training on their “white privilege” and on “systemic racism.” After sitting through this thing, Peterson decided that the supposed training course was egregious enough to require him to push back. On Tuesday (August 27) he put out an hour-long video describing the training sessions at length, and apparently he then emailed the video to some 16,000 people at Sandia. The video can be found at this link. It is filled with quotes from the so-called “training,” and from materials recommended in the “training.” A journalist named Christopher Rufo got wind of the situation, and has been publicizing it. On August 12 Rufo published a piece that described a similar training session that the top execs of Sandia had attended last year. Here are some choice excerpts from Rufo’s piece:

Last year, the national laboratory sent its white male executives to the La Posada luxury resort to undergo a mandatory training called “White Men’s Caucus on Eliminating Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Organizations.” . . .  The trainers insist . . . the white male employees must expose the “roots of white male culture,” which consists of “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work,” and “striving towards success”—which sound good, but are in fact “devastating” to women and POCs.  In fact, the trainers claim that “white male culture” leads to “lowered quality of life at work and home, reduced life expectancy, unproductive relationships, and high stress.” It also forces this “white male standard” on women and minorities.  In a subsequent session, the white males must publicly recite a series of “white privilege statements” and “male privilege statements.” They must accept their complicity in the white male system and their role in creating oppressions.

Do you sometimes wonder why so few quotes from these things seem to get leaked into the public forum? Here’s what happened to Peterson (from an August 27 tweet by Rufo):

Within hours [of Peterson distributing his video], Sandia executives dispatched a counterintelligence team to lock Peterson out of the network and scrub his communications from internal servers—which, via the Streisand Effect, made the video even more viral and sparked widespread unrest against Sandia executives.

So this situation is only just beginning to play out. Apparently Peterson has found some support within the employees at Sandia. He does not appear likely to back down easily; but of course, he probably will lose his job.

Or consider the next example of woke Biden-voting monoculture, art museums. In the brand new (September 2020) issue of The New Criterion, Roger Kimball has a piece headlined “The mob comes for the art world.” OK, you already know that the “art world” — the world of trendy artists and their galleries and museums — is part of the progressive groupthink, where dissent is not allowed. But what you may not know is that this art world is going through what Kimball calls a “purity spiral,” akin to the French Revolution, where each day increasingly higher levels of ideological purity are demanded to avoid the dread cancelation. As a leading example, Kimball gives the case of Keith Christiansen, a distinguished curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who recently made the mistake of praising French archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir (the guy famous for saving many artistic works from the destruction of the French Revolution) for “realiz[ing] that their value—both artistic and historical—extended beyond a defining moment of social and political upheaval and change.” Christiansen promptly got hit with a New York Times piece that called him “insensitive and tone deaf.” And then there are these other examples cited by Kimball:

The curatorial staff at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum issued a letter to the museum’s management decrying “an inequitable work environment that enables racism, white supremacy, and other discriminatory practices.” Unhappy ex-staffers at the New Orleans Museum of Art have issued an open letter castigating its “plantation-like culture” and racist attitudes. Ditto the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Gary Garrels, the senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was forced out after remarking during an online meeting that “we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.” Not to do so, he said, amounts to “reverse discrimination.”

Off with his head!

And I haven’t even gotten yet to the world of academia, where, as you know, the mob descends most every day on some pour soul or other who dares to dissent from the latest dictate of progressive purity. Here is a roundup of academic excess covering just the past week published on the Legal Insurrection blog today. Two of the best: Wisconsin Lutheran College faces backlash from students and alumni for inviting Vice President Mike Pence to speak; and Skidmore College students demand firing of faculty members who attended “Back the Blue” rally.

My question is, who would want to be associated with these people?