The Destruction is Intentional.
Why the problem with social justice isn’t just the marketing.
I’m trying something new with this article and I hope it goes over well. Colby Hess, a writer I greatly respect, recently posted an article that I think made some good points but missed the mark in some key ways. I will do some minor quoting to give the Reader’s Digest version of his take but please read his thoughtful article if you haven’t already.
The point of my article isn’t to debate or disagree with anything he says. He attributes good intentions and unfortunate marketing to several social justice warrior initiatives, and how that leads to them being misunderstood. If I believed the woke social justice warrior crowd were acting in good faith, and actually cared about the things they say they do, I would probably agree with everything he says.
If you owned a restaurant and had an idea for a delicious new menu item that you wished to call the “shit sandwich,” I would sincerely hope there’d be someone sensible nearby to try to dissuade you from embarking on such a horrifically misguided (and guaranteed market flop) naming choice. I mean, I don’t care how much bacon and secret sauce it has on it. Who wants to bite into a piping-hot shit sandwich?
When it comes to messaging in the realm of social justice activism, for some bizarrely myopic reason, there seem to be a lot of so-named sandwiches on the menu. It’s amazing no one in management or in the kitchen seems to have noticed.
Colby does a fantastic job of going through slogan by slogan how the marketing and messaging of each could be better. If their goal is to have a constructive discussion of issues then they should absolutely take his advice. If.
My premise is that they don’t care about having a collaborative discussion. I don’t think they’re victims of unfortunate but well-intentioned self owns. I think they’re telling the truth and saying exactly what they mean. To the extent they’ve made a branding error, it’s that they’re being too open about what they think.
When BLM exclusively talks about black and brown people and their only demand for whites is unquestioned obedience and support, they don’t mean black lives matter, too.
The point of these groups is to sow division and anger to allow for the advancement of their political goals. Never let a crisis go to waste because that’s when you make the biggest gains towards your objective.
I don’t claim to have all the answers or every fact at my disposal. I do however have some lived experience and expertise regarding law enforcement and at least the BLM aspect of the SJW agenda. And I’m enough of a nerd that I spend a lot of time reading and listening to information on other related topics.
So I don’t claim to know everything, but I feel like I know enough to make reasonable fact-based judgments, and I trust my intuition enough to think I see the motivation behind the SJW/woke movement, singular.
Wayback Machine Time
Which is my first point. It’s not a bunch of separate movements. It’s multiple fronts of the same ideology. If you can stick with me for this part I think my view will make sense.
If you can spare 14 minutes watch this video of former Soviet-era communist propagandist Yuri Bezmanov explaining the process of demoralization of a nation via ideological subversion.
If you’re going to say “psh, Soviets and communists don’t have anything to do with BLM and SJW craziness”, or just don’t have 14 minutes to spare, here are the Cliff’s Notes:
Demoralization takes place by corrupting the education system of a nation and teaching a generation that their country is bad. What Bezmanov calls ideological subversion. Perhaps anti-patriotism is another way to say it.
Once this process has occurred it is almost impossible to reverse until the corrupted education system is replaced and a new generation is educated without the anti-patriotism.
According to Bezmanov, only about 15% of the efforts of the KGB were directed at espionage in the spying sense of the word. The other 85% of their efforts were directed at cultural influence, focusing on academia and the entertainment industry.
Does any of that sound familiar? Children being taught that America is irredeemably racist, built on the backs of slaves, uniquely imperial and exploitative? 1619 Project anyone?
“The project directly challenges the narrative of American exceptionalism,” Hannah-Jones said in a talk in Fairfax, Virginia, this month. “We as a country need to believe that we were founded on these pure ideals.”
Her project aims to disabuse you of this view. She wants to dismantle “this mythology of America, this idea of American exceptionalism.”
To achieve this mass deprogramming, the country needs a fundamental conceptual overhaul, and since nothing is more primordial than what we believe about ourselves, the very heart of that must be struck. Hence, why her conversation in Fairfax was labeled “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.”
Well, OK. What does this have to do with woke SJW slogans? Am I saying that the various SJW fronts are Russian propaganda? Not exactly. I am saying they’re all part of a wider Marxist ideology that sprouted from Russian efforts to sow hate and discontent decades ago. Don’t believe me?
What about the co-founder of BLM saying they are trained Marxist activists?
BLM has since removed this part from their website because people noticed it, but what does “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” have to do with police reform? Nothing. But it was also a goal of Karl Marx.
Other Russian Psychological Operations
Before 2020 and the Democrats deciding that American elections were impervious to all forms of interference, they loved to tell us Donald Trump was illegitimate because Russia hacked the election, Putin installed Trump and other variations of the same thing. None of this was ever proven of course but when you’re on the left nothing ever has to be. The narrative is what it is regardless of the truth.
What was proven was that Russia did buy some thousands of dollars worth of Facebook ads and started Facebook groups on both sides of various issues. On at least one occasion, funding two groups to protest opposite sides of the same event. While not Marxist or ideological in nature, this showcases the Russian tactic of exploiting cultural divisions as a way to weaken their adversary.
Side Note on the Weather Underground
Because it was mentioned in the article above, I want to take a quick detour to the defunct domestic terrorist group and why it’s significant in the development of BLM. Students of ancient history like the 1960s and ’70s may recognize the name Weather Underground. It was a left-wing domestic terror organization responsible for numerous bombings and actually declared war against the United States government. If you don’t remember the 70s but the name sounds familiar, the politically involved may remember the minor controversy, thanks to a compliant media, that Barack Obama got his political start at a fundraiser hosted by Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, both former Weather Underground members turned academics. In 2001 Ayers said he wasn’t sorry and didn’t think they did enough bombings.
Academia and More History
It’s clear that a certain strain of leftist extremism has been running through academia and elite circles for quite some time. I don’t think this is news to anyone. Numerous studies show that registered Democrats vastly outnumber registered Republicans among university professors. According to one study, 39% of universities surveyed didn’t have any Republicans at all. Overall, this study found that not counting military service academies, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 12.7–1 overall. A 2022 survey of Harvard faculty for example found 45% of professors identify as liberal and 37% identify as very liberal.
It’s also known that the Soviet communists have been infiltrating American universities since the 1930s and have continued to the modern day.
In that respect, little has changed since 1938, when Semyon Markovich Semyonov became the first Soviet agent to enroll at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and made contacts vital to stealing scientific secrets. Or since 1958, when KGB officer Oleg Kalugin entered Columbia’s journalism school. After graduation, posing as a Radio Moscow correspondent at the United Nations, Kalugin attended events at Columbia and reported back on them to Moscow. His report on a speech about U.S.-Soviet relations by Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a Columbia professor and later national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, earned kudos from the Communist Party’s Central Committee…
[Kalugin] rose to head the KGB’s foreign counterintelligence branch before falling out of favor in Russia, moving to Washington, D.C., and becoming an American citizen.
Sometimes, Russian agents join the academic community as students or instructors. Of Guryeva and the other nine “illegals” — sleeper agents without diplomatic cover — who pleaded guilty in 2010 to conspiring to act as foreign agents and were swapped back to Russia, seven went to U.S. universities, including Harvard, The New School, and the University of Washington. One taught politics for a semester at Baruch College, lambasting American foreign policy.
As a result of the communists’ efforts, college graduates came out of universities having taken some degree of this indoctrination with them. Not everyone was a full-blown radical of course, but it was a start. Year after year and decade after decade these graduates go back into academia and move farther left. They move into business. They move into government. They move into entertainment, law, the media, and everything else you can possibly think of. Slowly but surely every institution was corrupted with people, exposed to if not fully indoctrinated in left-wing/socialism/communism. Remember, 85% of the KGB’s efforts were at influencing cultural change, not spying.
Current Day
Before you know it, these are the people teaching elementary school and normal people are saying, “how did this happen?”
If you’re familiar with sites like Libs of TikTok, you’ll be familiar with what some teachers brag about teaching students in grade school. Whether it’s trans/gender, race, the evils of capitalism, etc. But the aspect I think is the most dangerous are the teachers who say they are training kids to be activists.
Yes, teaching eight-year-olds to hate white people and consider cutting off their penis’ is terrible. So why is teaching children to be activists worse in my opinion? Because things nobody could have imagined happening 10 years ago are suddenly mainstream. Why? Because a generation of children were taught to be activists. What is the next generation of children activists going to bring?
I’m no Marxist scholar, but this seems to me to be the permanent revolution playing out in real-time.
The key words there are “without compromise or alliance.” That’s why it seems like the SJWs never get enough. Every compromise is just their new starting point. They don’t want this or that. They don’t want acceptance or tolerance. You will be made to care, but not just care. You will be made to affirm. You will eventually be made to participate. And if it ever seems like they have total control of something and they could say, “yay, we did it” and stop, they won’t. They can’t. They must permanently be changing definitions, testing loyalty, purging dissidents, and keeping people, even their “allies” unsure and afraid of being insufficiently committed to the cause.
So I don’t take any of the SJW fronts separately or on their individual merits even, because their goals don’t really have anything to do with police reform, or the climate, or trans people. Their goal is the destruction of the system and it’s a mistake to assume otherwise.
In 2021 when mass protests broke out in Cuba due to the communist government’s inability to provide basic necessities combined with authoritarian repression, BLM supported the communist government over the black and brown protesters. Why? Because supporting Marxism is more important than supporting people who are actually oppressed.
In an effort to keep this from turning into a 10,000-word book, I’m not going to go into all of the other fronts or the disastrous effects on the people these groups claim to represent. Suffice it to say, I don’t find them persuasive, and can’t help but notice that what all these groups want are the same things the Marxists want: higher taxes, less freedom, and more government control and the destruction of a cultural norm.
Even if you discard the notion that so much of the SJW movement is simply a bunch of Marxists trying to tear down Western Civilization, think about it this way. What is the motivation of the grievance industry to solve anything? Where do their cushy, important platforms go? What happens to the donations they somehow turn into mansions?
They have no motivation to succeed in solving problems. Just like the race hustlers of old, they benefit from exploiting people and perpetuating problems.