RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/05/26/locked-and-woke-americas-largest-defense-contractor-subjects-executives-to-racist-reeducation-n1450010

Lockheed is the largest defense contractor the United States has. It’s the chief contractor on the F-35 Lightning fighter program. It builds and maintains much of the arsenal of our republic, and even builds advanced scientific systems such as the Hubble Space Telescope.

It is now another woke capture in corporate America, according to documents leaked to investigative reporter Christopher Rufo.

Last year, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent white male executives to a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their “white male culture” and encouraging them to atone for their “white male privilege,” according to documents I have obtained.

The program, hosted on Zoom for a cohort of 13 Lockheed employees, was led by the diversity-consulting firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners, which specializes in helping white males “awaken together.” The Lockheed employees, all senior leaders in the company, included Aaron Huckaby, director of global supply chain operations; retired Air Force lieutenant colonel David Starr, director of the Hercules C-130 military transport program; retired Air Force lieutenant general Bruce Litchfield, vice president of sustainment operations; and Glenn Woods, vice president of production for the Air Force’s $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program. (Lockheed Martin did not return request for comment.)

Perhaps this is among the reasons the F-35 is wasting so much taxpayer money. The company that makes it is not focused on its mission.

The same company that led the Lockheed training, White Men As Full Diversity Partners, also led similar racial training at the sensitive Sandia National Labs according to Rufo.

Is this company systematically targeting America’s defense contractors for its divisive racial trainings? Congress must investigate.

But with the Democrats in charge, Congress will do nothing.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/may/23/todays-religion-of-wokeism-ignores-logic-science-a/

Two weeks ago, on May 8, 2021, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) became the first mainline Protestant denomination to elect a transgender bishop. 

The Rev. Megan Rohrer, a female who insists on using the pronouns “he” and “him,” was elected to serve as the leader of the Sierra Pacific Synod of the ELCA, by a vote 209 yeas to 207 nays. Rohrer will be installed on September 11 at St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Walnut Creek, California. 

In celebrating her election, the new bishop praised Lutherans for “dismantling” what she called the “unjust” Christian standards set 1,700 years ago at the First Council of Nicaea. In doing so, Rohrer proved herself to be more a minister of the goddess of Woke than of Christ.

In “Wokeism: The New Religion of The West” (ConvergMedia, October 20, 2020), Max Funk argues, “There is a new religion. It is moving like a tidal wave through every facet of western culture, shaping and redefining society as it goes. This religion masquerades under the guise of compassion and justice, but underneath is an evil ideology that is incompatible with western values and incongruent with the Christian worldview.”

Mr. Funk continues: “Wokeism is a religion. Although it has not been organized into any formal religious structure, it has all the functions of religious doctrine. It has a unique epistemology (theory of knowledge), an evaluation of the human condition, and a redemption narrative … The goal of [Wokeism],” says Mr. Funk, “is the complete dismantling and rebuilding of western culture from the ground up.” 

Traditional values such as “logic, science, and reason” are replaced by subjective opinions and emotions. This is a worldview of special knowledge rather than self-evident truths; a religion of no reality but my reality; a narcissistic faith grounded in gnosis rather than God’s revelation.

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/05/24/can-you-gues

It is passing strange to receive emails from people who highlight their personal pronouns. Yes, James, I made a wild stab and guessed yours are “he, him.” Thanks for letting me know. My preferred sandwich is a pastrami on rye.

Preferred sandwiches are still rare in official email signatures, but “preferred pronouns” are not. They are now commonplace at woke institutions and are gradually spreading to all professional workplaces. Even though it’s a small issue, it points to a bigger problem. The insistent direction to use my “preferred pronoun,” even when that word is already obvious, is yet another step into the deepening quicksand of cultural hectoring, turning every aspect of daily life into a political battlefield. That quicksand is spreading fast, and far too many are sinking beneath it without a murmur. It’s time to call it out.

The movement to make “preferred pronouns” standard features of professional signatures began with transgender advocates. They were soon joined by people who identified as neither men nor women. Their concern was understandable. They want to be addressed in the way they prefer. That’s absolutely fine. So is letting people know how to address you, if the answer is not already clear from your name. The goal should be to make interaction easier, not to preen or harass.

The oddity is why so many other people for whom the right pronoun is obvious now include it in their e-mail. What’s the point? For some, it is the now-conventional virtue signaling, spreading their peacock tails for all to admire. For others, it’s simply following whatever their colleagues do or their boss demands. Resistance, they know all too well, can be fatal to careers.

Here’s a typical example, from a recent email to me. The sender’s name is a common female one, and her email signature at the bottom of the note reads as follows:

Development Editor: Editorial Research

Content, Resources, and Development

Major international publishing company

Pronouns: she/her

Please consider the environment before printing this email.

As an aside, there’s a delicious note of irony here, even though the sender missed it. (Irony and humor are not strong points in Woke World.) If printing is such a blot on the environment, what about her own profession? She works for a publishing company, for heaven’s sake. Is she a mere tool of the deforestation-literacy complex? A foolish consistency must be the hobgoblin of woke minds.

In the case of personal pronouns, we seldom need to be told which ones to use. Who, pray tell, is confused that Nicholas is “he” and Nicole is “she”? When James Morris, who wrote a fine trilogy on the British Empire, became Jan Morris, everyone switched smoothly from “he” to “her.” We didn’t need the hall monitor’s wagging finger to tell us. Jan’s new name made the correct pronoun clear. Such clarity is not enough for woke culture. To appease them, you must state your preferred pronouns publicly and repeatedly, no matter how obvious your name makes them—or pay the price for refusal. In fact, the wokest of the woke go even further, as this Forbes columnist did. Drop the term “preferred” because it is entirely too mild. Instead, demand these pronouns.

https://www.city-journal.org/racial-hysteria-is-consuming-juilliard?wallit_nosession=1

Turn on CNN or open the New York Times, and you may encounter someone explaining how exhausting it is to be a black person. The idea that systemic racism is leaving blacks scarred and spent has been embraced across mainstream America, articulated by corporate CEOs and university presidents. The latest performative assertion of black oppression is playing out at the Juilliard School in New York City. The controversy has significance beyond the school.

In September 2020, the Juilliard School’s Drama Division announced a series of “community meetings” to address “Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB) issues.” The school’s growing cadre of diversity bureaucrats would discuss Juilliard’s’ “anti-racism work.” The head of the Center for Racial Healing would give a presentation. Workshops would address such topics as “race in rehearsal” and “voice and speech and race.” NYU theater professor Michael McElroy, one of the school’s two external diversity consultants, would offer a three-day seminar in black musical culture.

These Drama Division meetings were part of Juilliard’s broader effort to bring race into all its activities, including music and dance. Damian Woetzel, former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, became Juilliard’s president in July 2018 and proceeded to put increasing bureaucratic clout behind the concept that Juilliard has a racism problem. The school added diversity curricula and audition requirements. It beefed up its system for reporting bias incidents. It mandated diversity workshops for faculty and students.

Those efforts picked up steam after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Within a week, Woetzel and the EDIB taskforce had sent out three schoolwide emails on the “work” Juilliard still needed to do to become an “anti-racist community.” The school sponsored a blacks-only “healing” space. It recommended that students and faculty read the books of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Michelle Alexander to understand systemic racism. On June 11, 2020, Juilliard’s provost, Ara Guzelimian, circulated a student petition. Lending an administration email account to a student communiqué violated school protocol, but the Juilliard Student Congress’s “Call to Action” was important enough to justify the exception, wrote Guzelimian in his cover letter.

The Call to Action charged Juilliard with “systemic injustice.” It demanded an end to the school’s “almost completely Eurocentric” faculty, curriculum, and performances and a “complete in-person season featuring the works of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] artists.” It called on Juilliard to create #BreonnaTaylor and #GeorgeFloyd scholarships in music, drama, and dance.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/woke_culture_comes_for_shakespeare.html

William Shakespeare wrote his plays at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries. Over the years, people have tried to make Shakespeare more palatable for then-current audiences, either by putting the plays in new settings or getting rid of “objectionable” issues. Nothing, though, has ever equaled what Britain’s modern Globe Theater plans to do: It’s going to “decolonise” Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s plays have lasted 500 years. Even in 21st century America, we still routinely used words and phrases that Shakespeare first wrote: “admirable,” “barefaced,” “hostile,” “sanctimonious,” “all that glitters isn’t gold,” “break the ice,” “clothes make the man,” “a laughing stock,” “It’s Greek to me,” “too much of a good thing,” and many more.

It’s true that much of Shakespeare’s language is hard to understand for modern people — although, oddly, Americans may find Shakespeare’s English easier to understand when spoken as he would have spoken it, rather than as actors speak it today – but it’s still exquisitely beautiful. And while his plays’ values can be strange or even offensive, Shakespeare nevertheless had such a deep understanding of unchanging human nature that he always has currency. Whether it’s those stupid teenagers in Romeo and Juliet, the witty Beatrice and Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, or even Shylock’s ageless plea that others recognize his common humanity, he still can resonate with modern audiences.

At various times, people have tried to bring Shakespeare in line with their times.  In 1807, Thomas Bowdler created a cleaned-up Shakespeare, shorn of suicides, blasphemy, prostitution, etc., so that families could read it together without shame. His effort became so famous we still use his name as a verb for someone creating a mangled abridged version of an original work of written art. At around the same time, siblings Charles and Mary Lamb prepared a clean and simple version for children.

In our modern era, we’ve seen The Taming of the Shrew reworked as Kiss Me Kate, a brilliant Cole Porter musical; Richard III reimagined in a fictional 1930s fascist England; Much Ado About Nothing moved to small-town America at the end of the Spanish American war; and Macbeth transformed into a feudal Japanese tale in Throne of Blood. Shakespeare is almost infinitely malleable because, under the British renaissance trappings lies someone who understands people – how they behave in different circumstances and what motivates them, whether we look at people’s best or worst instincts.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/21/a-woke-lexicon/

At this point few will deny that there is a massive failure to communicate between the minions of the woke Left and those who have managed to maintain their equilibrium in a world gone off the rails. At least some substantial portion of that failure stems from the fact that too many of us hear woke Left terminology and take it literally, ascribing to it traditional definitions of the sort that might still be found in dusty dictionaries or that are tacitly shared by all involved in dinner-table conversations in ordinary American households. 

Thus, for example, when we hear the accusation of “racism” cast about recklessly every which way, we might feel bewildered or even exasperated if we approach the matter from the standpoint of the word’s customary meaning. To clear this and other similar misunderstandings up, I have endeavored to offer below a necessarily partial compilation of woke terms and what they really mean when voiced by those on the other side of our growing political divide. 

Please understand: as this is a work of cultural anthropology presenting a snapshot of the inner workings of an anti-culture that routinely purges its own most cherished creeds and their adherents, all definitions adduced here are necessarily provisional and may change drastically, even by the time you are done reading these words.

Please note, also, that in order to steer clear of even the appearance of Western imperialist hegemony, I have studiously avoided alphabetical order and presented the terms below in a sequence informed solely by the opaque workings of pure intuition and indiscriminate whim.

racism: 

      [archaic and rarely used in this sense today] the harboring, exhibition or embodiment in practices of ungrounded views or beliefs that some racial groups are inferior or superior to others in various ways
      a generalized term of derision commonly used in a manner similar to how terms such as “jerk” or “scoundrel” might have been employed in earlier epochs
      a label deployed in order to ostracize or as a prelude to a ritualized ostracism, roughly analogous to “witch” during the Salem witch trials
      a rallying cry used to muster support for Democratic Party candidates or policies, especially for candidates or policies that stand against the interests of poor and working class Americans; also, the central tenet of contemporary Democratic Party politics that is most often deployed ironically, that is, to refer to anything and everything as “racism” or “racist” in order to institute “corrective” practices or policies that are, in reality, far closer to the traditional notion of “racism” than the practices or policies that they seek to correct; see also anti-racism
      a fail-safe retort that may be strategically deployed to stifle disagreement or shut down debate, especially when it is a debate one is losing
      a label for the emotion of BIPOC individuals when their feelings are hurt
      a word news media companies with a shrinking audience, such as CNN or the New York Times, can and should throw around frequently and indiscriminately to drum up controversy and create fleeting spikes in viewership and/or readership to stave off their inevitable sell-offs and bankruptcies
      a false charge to be publicly leveled at in-laws (ideally, during softball interviews with Oprah) by wealthy, privileged, status-seeking, profiteering, half-BIPOC C-list actresses who marry into the British royal family but find themselves, due to their thoroughgoing narcissism, unable to get along with others, whether their own family or their new in-laws, especially when said actresses become upset and disenchanted with the whole “royal” thing upon discovering that her husband likely will never become King.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/race-crazed-disney-backs-down-matthew-vadum/

A humiliated Walt Disney Corporation scrubbed its bizarre critical race theory-based employee indoctrination materials from the Internet after a think tank scholar exposed them.

Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow and director of an initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute, celebrated Disney’s conspicuous retreat from the Left’s rarefied anti-white anti-Americanism, the New York Post reported May 13. Rufo defines critical race theory as “racialized Marxism.”

Disney “has removed its entire antiracism program from the company’s internal portal,” he said, “effectively scrubbing it out of existence.”

“This is a major victory in the war against ‘woke capital,’” he said, noting a “significant backlash from the public” after his initial report.

“Disney was peddling the most toxic elements of critical race theory — and my reporting led to immediate changes within the company,” Rufo said.

The environment at Disney has become increasingly politicized in recent months, Rufo reported employees telling him. The account appeared in a City Journal article he penned, titled, “The Wokest Place on Earth.”

There are “almost daily memos, suggested readings, panels, and seminars that [are] all centered around antiracism,” one said. Disney is “completely ideologically one-sided” and discourages conservative and Christian employees from expressing their views.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/you-may-not-speak-if-you-use-an-aggressive-tone/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

America’s descent into an Orwellian nightmare continues apace. Now government officials see fit to keep you from speaking out on policy matters if they don’t like your tone.

That’s the upshot of a recent encounter between Center for Equal Opportunity president Devon Westhill and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As we read here, Westhill had been invited to speak before the commission, but was then disinvited when Commissioner Janet Dhillon turned thumbs down because she didn’t like his remarks.

Federal officials don’t care much for freedom of speech. They prefer controlled speech that supports their efforts. And they’re getting more aggressive themselves in deciding what may or may not be said.

I’m afraid that this will only get worse.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-man-they-couldnt-cancel-11619806528?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The term “cancel culture,” like “political correctness” before it, is a comical expression for an ugly cultural pathology. To be canceled—an older, closely related term is “blacklisted”—is to have your public persona or influence assailed, typically by a sizable mob, for some real or perceived offense against progressive orthodoxy, whatever that orthodoxy may hold at the moment. For that to happen, you must possess some form of authority in the first place: an academic post, a political office, a role in the entertainment industry, employment with a “mainstream” media organization, a voice as an intellectual or imaginative writer.

But the targets of cancellation, having derived their legitimacy from consensus left-liberal culture, are typically not very good at defending themselves, or even understanding what happened to them. Often they apologize, despite having said or done nothing wrong, which only emboldens the cancelers. Or they fall back on pieties about free speech and the marketplace of ideas, as if their tormentors still believed in those principles.

One target of cancellation who is able to speak intelligently about it is Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto clinical psychologist, YouTube lecturer, and author of “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” (2018) and “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life,” published in March.

If you’re an ordinary curious person, Mr. Peterson won’t strike you as a likely target for moral outrage. He brings together a dizzying array of texts and traditions—Jungian psychoanalysis, the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, Frederick Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard and much else—to formulate basic lessons, or “rules,” about how humans might overcome their natural tendency to lassitude and savagery. His books, podcasts and lectures are impressively argued, frequently insightful and occasionally abrasive presentations of various principles of wise living.