So, yesterday, The (failing) New York Times ran a very lengthy and detailed article on how a cabal of right-wing groups and monied individuals are trying to organize a national campaign to cleanse college campuses of the noxious ideology of liberalism, in particular programs and courses which promote D.E. I., other wise known as diversity, equity and inclusion, also referred to as ‘Woke.’
The intellectual hotbed for this initiative is an outfit in California, the Claremont Institute, which underwrites all kinds of alt-right publications designed to create a counterweight to the liberal culture which permeates universities, media and everywhere else which tries to strip American society away from its basic commitment to limited government and the principles on which the country was allegedly founded.
Yet for all the talk by these assholes about how they are making a national effort to restore America to its traditional values, the only states where this strategy seems to be working are in – where else? – some of the old Confederate states. Laws banning or limiting D.E.I. content in educational environments have been passed in Florida and Texas, fat-ass Sarah Huckabee Sanders has issued am executive order in Arkansas along the same lines, one or two other Southern states will probably promulgate some anti-Woke or anti-D.E.I. provisions as well.
The idea that a bunch of red-neck assholes representing the trailer park contingent should start telling a college or university what can or should be taught or can’t be taught is so bizarrely stupid that it’s laughable to the extreme. These new missionaries for the cleansing of American higher education wouldn’t know what the words ‘academic freedom’ mean if their lives depended on it.
For all their talk about how they want ‘freedom’ for everyone to decide things for themselves, these right-wing shitheads wouldn’t want anyone to hold an opinion which didn’t conform to the way they view the world, particularly the world as defined by a blend of racism, ultra-patriotism, and Christian nationalism.
In that respect, either today or tomorrow I’m going to review Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers, which is an objectively based study of how what started as an aggressive attempt to build a wider religious alternative to the traditional Protestant denominations has now become an ultra-organized, political movement contesting for political hegemony in numerous states.
Except as the NYT article makes clear, the states which have gone furthest in terms of inculcating the gospel of anti-liberalism into legal statute all happen to be states which were part of the Confederacy when the Civil War erupted in 1861.
Having failed at keeping black Americans subservient to Jim Crow, these white rednecks south of the Mason-Dixon line are now developing a new political ethos which again puts the white race in a dominant position versus everyone else, except in this instance race and ideology have been fused into a so-called ‘defense’ of our founding traditions, which means white, Christian men telling everyone else how to think and how to behave.
For the life of me, I never understood why we took back those 13 Confederate states in 1865. Why did we fight a four-year war and inflict hundreds of thousands of human casualties on both sides so that a bunch of New York bankers could continue to reap profits from the sale and shipment of Southern plantation commodities overseas?
I love how we revere Lincoln for talking about ‘one nation, indivisible.’ Where’d he get that one from?
If some of those shit Southern states want to quit the Union now, fuck ‘em, let ‘em go. What do we get from them anyway? Tobacco?
What did we ever get from the South? Jazz? Big, fucking deal.
If you have the stomach for it, go back and take a look at the videos of George Floyd’s last moments on Earth. Now granted, he was killed in a northern state. But funny how racism seeps around from place to place.
And the spore of that hatred is still humming along in the same Southern states which are now trying to keep the true history of this country out of public schools. And doing it, by the way, in the name of ‘freedom.’
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