DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory.

The Fever of Wokedom is seemingly, more prevalent and with a higher cognitive mortality rate than Covid-19.

I have suggested that we are in a period of the Great Revealing - the Social Justice/Critical Theory movement has reached a tipping point, and their religious fanatics are now trying to purify society and destroy people and careers. It is unpleasant and dangerous.

But it is revealing. Who supports the sheer idiocy of getting rid of the police? Who is it that wants to reintroduce segregation by creating racially separate spaces on campuses? Who wants to declare their racism by publicly subscribing to Social Justice/Critical Theory? All is being revealed.

And on the positive side, particularly in the academy and in mainstream media, closet Classical Liberals are finally having to step forward and raise their voices for progress and development and the against violence, racism, totalitarianism, violence, anger, and repression of the Social Justice/Critical Theory movement. It is reassuring to hear those voices, silent for so long.

Matt Taibbi is among the braver and the more articulate, defending the principles of Classical Liberalism though hating the party nominally most committed to them. The flow of his articles denouncing the danger of overturning Classical Liberalism in return for Social Justice/Critical Theory" steadily rises.

His most recent is a book review of one the more absurd events of an absurd year. From On “White Fragility”: A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism by Matt Taibbi.

Read the whole thing for the more complete argument. However, it is full of zingers. He begins sedately.

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.

But then the flame-thrower comes out.

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

Social Justice/Critical Theory depends on a religious faith with a tautological belief at its core and which makes argument fruitless.

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

More

DiAngelo writes like a person who was put in timeout as a child for speaking clearly. “When there is disequilibrium in the habitus — when social cues are unfamiliar and/or when they challenge our capital — we use strategies to regain our balance,” she says (“People taken out of their comfort zones find ways to deal,” according to Google Translate). Ideas that go through the English-DiAngelo translator usually end up significantly altered, as in this key part of the book when she addresses Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” speech.

The jibes keep coming.

It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.

Classical Liberals of the center and right have been invoking the increasing similarity between the Social Justice/Critical Theory movement and the Struggle Sessions of the Mao era. Certainly an effective rhetorical turn but initially it struck me as a tad over-stretching. I see though, that Taibbi also thinks we are already there in terms of Maoist repressive behaviors.

The downside, which we’re already seeing, is that organizations everywhere will embrace powerful new tools for solving professional disputes, through a never-ending purge. One of the central tenets of DiAngelo’s book (and others like it) is that racism cannot be eradicated and can only be managed through constant, “lifelong” vigilance, much like the battle with addiction. A useful theory, if your business is selling teams of high-priced toxicity-hunters to corporations as next-generation versions of efficiency experts — in the fight against this disease, companies will need the help forever and ever.

Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was denounced for expressing the opinion that “anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities." He reportedly was forced out of the Writer’s Union of Canada for the crime of “cultural appropriation,” and denounced as a racist by many, including a poet named Gwen Benaway. The latter said Niedzviecki “doesn’t see the humanity of indigenous peoples.” Last week, Benaway herself was denounced on Twitter for failing to provide proof that she was Indigenous.

Michael Korenberg, the chair of the board at the University of British Columbia, was forced to resign for liking tweets by Dinesh D’Souza and Donald Trump, which you might think is fine – but what about Latino electrical worker Emmanuel Cafferty, fired after a white activist took a photo of him making an OK symbol (it was described online as a “white power” sign)? How about Sue Schafer, the heretofore unknown graphic designer the Washington Post decided to out in a 3000-word article for attending a Halloween party two years ago in blackface (a failed parody of a different blackface incident involving Megyn Kelly)? She was fired, of course. How was this news? Why was ruining this person’s life necessary?

People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of “anti-black racism” to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to start submarining each other’s careers before they’ve even finished growing?

You have an odd situation when the center and right side of the Classical Liberal spectrum are more upset about the injustices being done against left-leaning academics than is the Social Justice/Critical Theory crowd are perfectly happy indulging in a digital day of defenestrating everyone they can get their hands on.

it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences. Meanwhile books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which are both beautiful and actually anti-racist, have been banned, for containing the “N-word.” (White Fragility contains it too, by the way). It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided.

A lot of people are reaching that same conclusion. The unseating of the Mandarin Class by the silent majority seems to be gathering steam.