If America is as innately evil as some of our educators and “anti-racism” trainers say it is, then what business do we have being in Afghanistan, or anywhere else, for that matter? A nation that preaches these things flirts with the type of debacle we are seeing in Afghanistan.
Maybe there is a silver lining to the national humiliation that just concluded. If anything good can come of the tragedy in Kabul, it should be a national reckoning on whether we have the national unity and confidence that remaining a superpower requires.
The reckoning should include those who want to become our future leaders. Do they think we are systemically racist, and that our founding ideals were evil, as our teachers are now instructing our children, and highly paid anti-racist trainers tell our workers?
To undertake this reckoning will require pluck. The forces behind these curricula and training programs insist that all they are doing is finally confronting America’s foundational racism, and providing remedies — the training programs and the curricula — that will help us work our way out of what they insist is an oppressive system. Who could possibly object?
Supporters range from academics who have long held these views, generally known as critical race theory (CRT), to the consultants who benefit financially from the racial turmoil they have helped create, to the dogmatic leaders of Black Lives Matter, to the part of the general population that can be described as “woke.”
Confronting them is not for the weak-kneed. After all, they claim to be working on behalf of the weakest members of society, and they’re happy to smear as “racist” those who dare question them. But having seen in the Kabul debacle what can befall a superpower when its leadership loses its confidence in the goodness of its people, it becomes clear that a reckoning becomes imperative.
Without national unity, a nation cannot launch itself into what Arthur Schlesinger—no conservative he—called “historic purposes,” and wars should count as one. In a country such as ours with “people of different ethnic origins,” said the top intellectual in John Kennedy’s White House, “unless a common purpose binds them together, tribal antagonisms will drive them apart.”
Journalists misguidedly labeled the riots and destabilization of 2020—what kicked the current racial turmoil into high gear—the year of “racial reckoning” (Google that, and you get close to 630,000 hits). They overlooked the possibility that the Marxist-led BLM organizations were manipulating people’s emotions after the death of George Floyd to achieve the goals they had harbored for decades.
A real national reckoning would take this possibility into account, and put our leaders on the spot.
The current administration constantly uses the catchphrases of CRT like “systemic racism,” “equity,” and “white privilege.” President Joe Biden, a career politician who in 40 years showed not a smidgen of interest in any of this, now mouths these terms with regularity, and signs bills inspired by these beliefs. With Vice President Kamala Harris there is at least no doubt; she has long demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the philosophies in question.
Even our own United Nations ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, declared earlier this year that “the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.”
The military brass that reports to these civilian leaders — not coincidentally the same officers who have overseen the botched Afghan withdrawal — have also paid lip service. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says he wants to understand “white rage,” another CRT catchphrase. The U.S. military wants its fighting men and women to read CRT texts.
Just so we understand, CRT holds that the Founding and Constitution, the document our fighting men and women swear to protect from enemies foreign and domestic, are illegitimate. It also holds that everything we do, “the ordinary business of society” in the words of CRT architect Richard Delgado, perpetuates white supremacy. This is why the brass is telling soldiers to focus on unintended “micro-aggressions” in interpersonal relations, rather than concentrating on macro-aggressions between adversaries on the battlefield.
The American people, or at least a great portion of them judging by recent rallies and polls, reject this as utter nonsense.
Maybe our media should stop asking Biden what ice cream he likes and ask him and those around him just how evil they think our nation is, and how much of the national foundation they want to uproot. Once we get their answers or prevarications, we can have a real reckoning on what our place in the world is.
