by Roger Kimball
Should Kamala Harris be installed in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue come January, she and Tim Walz would depend upon destructive agents to carry out their radical agenda to “deconstruct” America.
Asked what fundamental lesson he had learned from his up-close and personal experience of the Nazis during the Holocaust, the great Elie Wiesel said, “When someone tells you he wants to kill you, believe him.”
I thought of that sterling nugget of advice when reading about Brian Lozenski, an associate professor of Urban and Multicultural Education and chair of the Educational Studies Department at Macalester College, Minnesota, and, more to the point, Tim Walz’s chief educational guru.
Somewhat like Walz himself, Lozenski seems never to be without an avuncular smile. But if you actually listen to what he says, you soon discover that he is an apostle for a most thoroughgoing and destructive radicalism. Lozenski is typical of a certain type of left-wing radical. He happily enjoys all the perquisites of an academic appointment in an advanced capitalist society but espouses a destructive ideology that, were it enforced, would destroy the institutions his prosperity depends upon.
Vivek Ramaswamy recently posted a video of Lozenski explaining what he means by “ethnic studies” and “critical race theory.” It’s really something… special.
“Studies,” “theory.” Such terms might sound like your run-of-the-mill academic palaver. But Lozenski is crystal clear that he understands those terms as weapons to be used to “deconstruct,” i.e., to destroy, the United States of America. “The first tenet of critical race theory,” he says,
is that the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with. It must be overthrown. And so we [proponents of critical race theory] can’t be like, ‘Oh no, critical race theory is just about telling our stories, and diversity.’ It’s not about that. It’s about overthrow. It’s insurgent. . . . You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. It is a[n] anti-state theory that says the United States needs to be deconstructed, period.
Whatever else can be said about that statement, it certainly has the virtue of clarity.
The commentator Tom Klingenstein first brought Lozenski to my notice. Writing about the video that Ramaswamy linked, Klingenstein says, “This is the most important video of this election cycle.” Why? “Because it shows clearly that there exists in America an enemy regime that wants to destroy us.” Lozenski, Klingenstein goes on to note, “is not a marginal figure; he is a nationally known activist and academic, typical of the destructive left. Trump often says, correctly, that the enemy within is far more dangerous than the enemy without. Here, right in front of us, is the enemy within.”
This is true. If it all sounds familiar, it is because we’ve heard it all before. Remember Jeremiah Wright? That was Barack Obama’s black pastor who instructed his flock that they shouldn’t say “God bless America” but “Goddamn America.” Then there was Ward Churchill, the “ethnic studies” professor who compared the victims of 9/11 to Nazi bureaucrats. In one sense, Brian Lozenski is just business as usual in the academy these days. Radical anti-American rhetoric has been part of the academic identity kit for decades. The difference is that recent iterations of the toxin—largely under the rubric of critical race theory—have sought to move the radicalism beyond the seminar room and put it to work in businesses and even government bureaucracies.
Brian Lozenski tells the world that the United States “as constructed” is “irreversibly racist.” But whatever else it is, the United States is a product of the Enlightenment ideas of the eighteenth century. Is that a problem for the proponents of critical race theory? Not at all. According to Richard Delgado, a law professor and one of the founders of the discipline, “Racism and enlightenment are the same thing.”
Why? I won’t say that Delgado offers anything convincing by way of an explanation. Rather, he festoons such assertions with other cognitive thunderclaps, for example, the contention—especially popular in the politicized intellectual slums of the academy today—that the very concept of merit is “a prominent example” of “the kind of racism evident in facially neutral laws.” How convenient, if your own activities are bereft of intellectual merit, that you can contend that the whole idea of merit is “racist” and therefore worthy of rejection.
Delgado was something of an outlier when he first wrote about critical race theory in the 1990s. The malign fatuousness of his ideas was confined largely to the ivied bowers of the university. Nowadays, as the example of Brian Lozenski and others shows, such racial triumphalism has escaped from the academy. To employ a metaphor dear to the hearts of these new antinomians, the ideas of Critical Race Theory—above all, the idea that impartiality is itself racist—have “colonized” the boardrooms and human resource departments of major corporations. They have also, as the journalist Christopher Rufo has detailed, made astonishing inroads into major institutions of the federal government, where a cadre of highly paid consultants run consciousness-raising workshops whose constant theme is the perfidiousness of American society, especially its free-market orientation and, most particularly, the white, male actors who have dominated its history.
One of the agencies affected is the U.S. Treasury, where a consultant named Howard Ross—for a combined fee of more than $5 million—ran training sessions to inform employees that “virtually all white people contribute to racism.” The 8,900 employees of the National Credit Union Administration were treated to a similar catechism. America was “founded on racism,” they were told in a scripture right out of The 1619 Project, and “built on the backs of people who were enslaved.” America’s nuclear arsenal is manufactured at the Sandia National Laboratories. You might think that such an institution would be careful to distance itself from radical, anti-American sentiment. But Rufo has shown that Sandia held a “three-day reeducation camp for white males,” teaching them to “deconstruct their ‘white male culture’ and forcing them to write letters of apology to women and people of color.”
Similar programs have infested many other agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, whose “Office of Diversity and Inclusion” (who knew?) hosts weekly “Intersectionality Workshops.”
In brief, agencies throughout the federal government are home to a radical fifth column devoted to the destruction of the principles and institutions that undergird American society. Taxpayers have been funding initiatives whose aim is to teach us to hate ourselves. It is no wonder that during his first term, President Trump, informed about these activities, issued an executive order to ban the teachings of Critical Race Theory and kindred ideologies in the federal government.
An ominous sign of how deeply ingrained those teachings are was the news that the Centers for Disease Control flouted that order and proceeded with a thirteen-week program under the tutelage of Critical Race Theory in order to challenge America’s “white supremacist ideology,” dilate on racism as “a public health crisis,” and expose the country’s supposed “systemic racism.”
Critical Race Theory is prominent among the intellectual foundations of the hate-America campaign, whose origins were in the academy but whose graduates have infiltrated every institution of American life. The operational side of this campaign was seen nightly on city streets from Portland, Oregon, to Washington, D.C., when groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter rampaged across American cities supposedly to protest the death of George Floyd but really to push ahead with their campaign to destroy America.
A couple of years ago, it was disconcerting to see genteel suburban lawns littered with “Black Lives Matter” signs when the movement is dedicated to the destruction of the society that makes suburbia possible. Lenin quipped darkly about the bourgeoisie selling Communists the rope with which to hang them. These capitulations witness witless liberals eagerly lining up to ascend the gallows.
Because of his proximity to real political power, moronic clowns like Brian Lozenski are dangerous as well as fatuous. Should, heaven forbid, Kamala Harris be installed in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue come January, she and Tim Walz would depend upon destructive agents like Lozenski to carry out their radical agenda to “deconstruct” America. We must be doubly grateful, then, that Donald Trump is on the case. He repeatedly demonstrated at his rallies and his social media postings at Truth Social that he understands the threat posed by Lozenski’s weaponized, virulently anti-American version of “ethnic studies.” An executive order will have to wait until January 20 to be promulgated. I hope, however, that his staff is already formulating a response to this new and aggressively toxic brand of politics masquerading as a form of intellectual endeavor.
Roger Kimball
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/27/from-the-classroom-to-congress-the-rise-of-anti-american-rhetoric-in-critical-race-theory/
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