We will remain vigilant as to the direction Target takes toward more books concerning sex and gender. It is no surprise that Target has begun to take an illiberal stance in its corporate beliefs. Back in 2016 Target announced per in message of inclusivity that it would install genderless bathrooms but after some protesting it redirected $20 million dollars to install private, third options restrooms according to CNN.
Back in mid-october our own Kimberly Hagen took these photos of the propaganda that Target pushes now on its audience. Violence, gender confusion, and race baiting:
We are calling this propaganda because target has specifically decided to only push one side of an argument. It no longer is of a free market but it has chosen ideological grounds through means of identity and identity politics. No longer are legitimate views allowed that counter gender, sex or other forms of progressive, postmodern, and critical race theorist forms of identity. Clearly Target stores have abandoned all forms of rationality and intends to enforce its values on the general populace to the extent that it’s willing to ban books. Welcome to Soft-Totalitarianism.
What Target and LGBTQ advocates refuse to acknowledge is that there is a legitimate difference between being “anti-gay” and holding the view that homosexuality is a sin, or a person believes that marriage should be between a man or woman, or even consider the scientific gender/sex research that counters transgender arguments. No, these advocates see only ideology.
Glenn Greenwald reported that the ACLU has begun to take a divergent and contradictory stance of its own toward the banning of books in the name of “Hate Speech” specifically advocated by Chase Strangio, the ACLU’s Deputy Director for Transgender Justice of its LGBT & HIV Project. Greenwald writes:
My interview with Strangio was too long ago for me to comfortably summarize it, but suffice to say there was no question that his views on free speech are sharply divergent from those that caused me to regard ACLU lawyers and their free speech absolutism as among my childhood heroes. If you want to hear reasons why the ACLU should be more reluctant to represent the free speech rights of “dangerous” extremists and why free speech should give way to other, more important values — views I vehemently reject — Strangio is about the most thoughtful advocate I’ve heard in defense of that position.
Target is not alone as larger companies like Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple all push similar agendas. Terrifying when one considers the possibility of censorship compounded by these multinational companies. That is why it is important to speak out against this illiberalism that now threatens freedom and liberty for all.
TheDiversity Delusion is a scathing critique of the politics, methods, and concepts that have informed contemporary diversity policy in American colleges. Mac Donald argues that diversity is fashioned into an ideology for coercing compliance, contrary to the spirit of a university education. In developing this argument, the author cites several quantitative studies and some notable case studies, centering on the identity politics of race and gender in college campuses.
Mac Donald develops her argument systematically, beginning with an assessment of diversity politics as a system that empowers pandering administrators to engage in thought policing on behalf of certain ‘preferred’ groups. This system is implemented under the guise of promoting ‘multiculturalism’, but in effect produces negative value judgments on those forms of knowledge and expression associated with non-minority categories such as males or whites. These negative value judgments are institutionalized through a group of administrators the author refers to as ‘diversocrats’. By silencing those they disagree with, the author argues, diversocrats claim to espouse postmodernism or relativism while actually imposing a form of totalitarianism (p. 20).
Mac Donald argues that totalitarian ‘diversocrats’ threaten the pursuit of humanities, truth, and science in university, promoting niche fields that provide narrow support to the ‘diversity’ project. Examples of this include the replacement, rather than supplementation, of classical curricula in classical rhetoric, oratory grammar, and literature with abstract study areas in fields like gender, race, and sexuality studies. For Mac Donald, this reflects a narcissistic turn, as these policies assume that students can only gain value by learning about things that they can relate to experientially. In the process, this approach may undermine the transmission of nuggets of knowledge considered more neutral, especially those in the humanities.
Finally, the author argues that diversity policies rely on falsehoods to pander to gender and racial identity politics. For instance, when it comes to race, diversity policies provided reduced nominal standards for less qualified minorities to access elite flagship state schools like UC-Berkeley and UCLA, through newly-adopted ‘holistic’ admissions criteria. Mac Donald identifies a number of faults with these policies, the most important being the proliferation of what she calls ‘victimology’. This concept relies on ‘mismatch theory’ and links obsessions with ‘microaggressions’ to a psychology of inadequacy created when students are admitted into colleges in which they are not equipped to excel. The real hindrance to URM achievement, according to Mac Donald, is an ideological rejection of cultural values pertaining to education, and a rejection of the meritocracy associated with bourgeois culture. Mac Donald also presents a historical case study of sexual promiscuity and the campus rape movement as another instance of diversocrat totalitarianism.
The Diversity Delusion is a bold and controversial assault on the campus ideology of diversity, but it is helpful to explore some of the weaker methodological choices in the book. While most case studies in the book focus on how diversity and identity politics play out in college campuses across the United States, these themes are also explored in the context of the corporate world and Hollywood. In other words, the book has a very broad focus. While this may help with reaching a variety of mainstream readers, there are times when it seems that the book’s central message is lost. For instance, Mac Donald devotes an entire chapter to a critique of the #MeToo movement in the context of Hollywood, and another to discussing the racial politics of policing. While it is clear that the author is trying to provide the broader societal context of diversity policy and identity politics in these chapters, logical connections to campus politics are not clearly made. The book would have thus likely benefited from the omission of these two chapters, in favor of a more singular focus on diversity ideology in American higher education. Still, there are a few instances when the college-corporate themes are connected more logically. For instance, Mac Donald projects skepticism about the notion that victimology proponents can ‘grow out’ of victim politics, since the same politics are increasingly being adopted into corporate diversity training programs (p. 22).
Along these lines, the organizational structure of the book also leaves much to be desired. Diversity Delusion is organized into four parts, the first on race, the second on gender, the third on university bureaucracies, and the fourth on the purpose of the university. A total of sixteen chapters constitute these parts. While the organization of chapters within the individual parts is logical, the book reads like a collection of essays at times and the thematic organization of the four parts is not always effective. Although the race and gender sections were likely provided first to entice mainstream readers, a more logical organizational scheme would likely move parts 3 and 4, on educational bureaucracies and educational theory, respectively, to the beginning of the book where they could provide some initial conceptual grounding.
With all this being said, Mac Donald’s findings regarding the failings of counter-bourgeois culture, and the idiosyncrasies of diversity politics in college campuses are alarming. They present a challenge to liberal educators, who must balance any needs for inclusion with the realities of cultural difference as well as the preservation of curricula that have made American universities elite to begin with. The most effective arguments in Diversity Delusion are those that present human stories that portray counterintuitive narratives to those espoused by diversity promoters. One particularly poignant case in this regard is that of Kashawn Campbbell, an affirmative-action admit at UC-Berkeley whose first-year GPA suffered as a lack of his academic preparation and inability to master even basic writing. While Campbell’s inflated grades in African American courses allowed him to continue into sophomore year, the experience took a mental toll, making him feel inadequate and unwelcome, although the university clearly skewed its admission standards in his favor. In the end, the cognitive dissonance resulted in Campbell’s attribution of his feelings towards racism and microaggressions, rather than his clear lack of academic preparation. This story is what pushes Mac Donald to decry, “[r]acial preferences are not just ill-advised; they are positively sadistic” (p. 61).
The driving theme in Diversity Delusion is that diversity promoters may continue to hold on to flawed ideas about minority achievement and culture, often with the best of intentions. While Mac Donald made these assessments in 2018, it is helpful to consider them today in the context of two controversial articles that have recently made similar assessments. First, Mead (2020) asserted that poverty in the United States has more to do with minority rejection of Western individualist cultures, than with systemic failures to accommodate diversity. Similarly, Wang (2020) relied on mismatch theory to argue that affirmative action discriminates against non-minority students with superior credentials, and even hurts talented minorities. Both authors cited academic data and published their findings in reputable academic journals, but both have since been decried as racists, subjected to severe academic discipline. Both authors have since retracted their articles, perhaps forcibly. The eerily similar trajectories of these two cases seem to support Mac Donald’s more concerning assertion, that diversity promoters may use totalitarian means to enforce their ideas on anyone who disagrees. At the very least, readers will likely question whether and why ‘diversocrats’ may want to promote every kind of diversity except the type that has to do with alternative viewpoints.
In the end, Diversity Delusion is crucial reading, both for campus diversity promoters and for anyone with more critical viewpoints on multiculturalism. The book will have limited appeal to policy-makers in curriculum and instruction, as issues related to epistemology and preservation of classical curricula are mostly left unaddressed. There is indeed a cursory chapter near the end exploring a subscription service known as the Great Courses, but it seemed that Great Courses found profitability outside the university system. The implication in Mac Donald’s review of this case thus seems to be that there is no solution forthcoming from within the academy, where postmodernism seems destined to reign. Still, it is not clear that the politics and curricular implications of diversity and victimology in college campuses were analyzed deeply enough in this volume to reach this disconcerting conclusion.
Wang, N. (2020). “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019.” Journal of the American Heart Association9(7). https://doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.120.015959. (retracted)
Over the last sixty years the United States has slowly become entrapped by radicalism; a radicalism that now pervades nearly every corner of politics along with our institutions of higher education, hospitals, corporations, government agencies, and schools. Critical race theory, postmodernism, and cultural marxism are a few of the embodied ideological hosts that rule over the minds of these radicals as their ideas put forth a “pedagogy of oppression” into all their diehard cohorts and willful followers along with those who have been too demoralized or propagandized by the madness to raise objections. In no way, shape, or form do their ideas have zero place in a liberal society as ideas are welcomed yet critically analyzed, but rather the radicalized ideologues have determined that their “oppressors” have no place in their brave new world. Unfortunate considering that when one sees the world merely through the lens of oppression there is no longer a place for opportunity or open debate; there is only a place for conformity, criticism, riots, and finally usurpation. The late Sir Roger Scruton warned of this coming rise against the West:
If you look at the organs of opinion in Britain and Europe, and at the institutions such as universities, in which the self- consciousness of European societies is expressed and developed, you find almost everywhere a culture of repudiation [emphasis added] (Scruton 2014, p. 40)
Modern western democracies are not only being repudiated, but facing mass dereliction as cities, states, and institutions surrender to radical causes one by one. In book one of The Laws, Cicero describes a point at which:
We must clarify the nature of justice, and that has to be deduced from the nature of man. Then we must consider the laws by which states ought to be governed, and finally deal with the laws and enactments which peoples have compiled and written down (Cicero 2008, p. 103).
Conservatives understand all too well that ideas have consequences. No culture nor society at large can escape decades of poor decisions. We understand that no man is always good, none are always right, and perfectibility is an impossibility. It would be easy to scapegoat “the left” however truth over lies requires us to address reality as it is and as it once was. Conservatives and the right have made a plethora of mistakes from favoring corporatist endeavors over middle America or committing to a neoconservative warpath whose zeal remains in Washington to this day both of which costing billions of dollars and more importantly millions of lives. Blood is on all our hands. Although I presently believe the leftist winds blow hardest on the western front, a harsh neo-Socialism driven by identity politics and so-called anti-racist policies, there is no excuse for the moral sexual decay that has captured the culture infecting our American ethos. An ethos that the plutocratic oligarchs are going along with to deepen their coffers. Now is the time to lay bare the nature of justice in which we can deduce.
A Culture of Obscenity
Richard M. Weaver wrote that the “failure of the concept of obscenity has been concurrent with the rise of the institution of publicity which, ever seeking to widen its field in accordance with the canon of progress, makes a virtue of desecration” (Weaver, p. 26). Weaver was concerned with the rise of sensational journalism (a prophetic and grave turning revelation). However I aim to borrow those terms (desecration and obscenity) in order to highlight a culture now devoid of real virtue; a culture that praises falsity and crudeness as freedom. Americana, where vice is virtue, a modern newspeak, with liberation as its guise.
Abortion By Right
If any expression could mar the soul it would be the false impression that there is a right to kill unborn children. Yet, according to Pew Research as of 2019 public support for abortion is 61% in all or most cases. And like many disturbing ideas arising from the academy there are scholars who support the idea of infanticide most famously Peter Singer’s selective infanticide. Although the fringe belief that children are not moral agents but merely unproductive flesh that people can choose to nurture or kill has been taken root despite objections; inklings of great depravity to come unless actual laws are put into place to bulwark these dangers against the unborn and just born alike.
The radicalized ideologues have determined that their “oppressors” have no place in their brave new world
Adulteration of Youth
Adulteration is the process of inputing a crude substance within a food or cosmetic that taints the original source making a knockoff from the actual and the pure. That very process is being conducted on children in America as WAP takes center stage as radical feminist achievement along with the Netflix Original Cuties parading young girls through a miasma of so- called liberation of twerking, booty shorts, and sexualization. This is the epitome of evil disguised as freedom for women and young girls. Make no mistake WAP and Cuties are correlated in the sexualization of society as teens mimic their environment. Families are saturated in a sea of distractions that like fast food has become enormously addictive and dangerous to societal wellbeing. Target stores celebrates sexual health with sex toys when historically sexual acts and sex toys have been understood as adult artifacts kept out of the innocent eyes of children. What the youth see as normal they will adapt into their lifestyle. Conservatives do not have to be prudish to understand the need to prevent this form of adulteration. We must go on the offensive.
Pornographic as Good
Very much a part of adulteration but importantly distinct as pornography is seen as freedom of speech as a right to sex and a right to sex work are seamlessly integrated into modern liberalized societies. Christians and Conservatives are not free from this burden as pornography runs rampant in churches, colleges, and states. Technology has expedited the profane and the obscene as another commodity in the free market. Under no false pretenses is the pornographic a liberator or an adjudicator of justice rather its is a master over its slaves and a harsh judge over impoverished souls. Youth today have succumbed to its anguish. It is time to cancel porn forever.
Normalization of Dysphoria
Lastly the crowds trend slowly to accepting transgenderism and pedophilia as sexual orientations; a Foucauldian dream turned reality. Desmond Napoles, a thirteen year old boy turned crossdresser is the LGBTQ poster child made famous by RuPaul and other LGBTQ advocates. These “advocates” see nothing wrong with the children not only acting as adults, but believing that gender itself does not even exist. Female Erasure as “TERF feminist” (trans exclusionary radical feminist) rightfully describe and fear it. When “men” can have menstrual periods and give birth there is no longer an edge of distinction between the male and the female. Nothing is sacred or real or true concerning the material world except subjective beliefs ironically only once accepted by the collective. Conservatives cannot afford to allow these lies to persist.
Our Children’s Lives
America’s moral decay now reaches children from the womb-to-grave. A liberation of the obscene proclaims a false virtue that ends at the alter of desecration. As Weaver forewarned, late modernity has failed to produce true heroes. It shows. We need heroes to withstand the desecration of our children and our families and the hardworking American’s who sacrifice daily for this nation. This is a call for real liberators to proclaim truth, self-control, and peace at the face of darkness. Let us praise virtue over desecration, principles over politics, faith & reason over ideology. Let us seek true Conservatism. All things veritas!
References
Anderson, Ryan. (2019, January 29). The Left Is Shunning Liberals With Concerns About Transgender Agenda. The Heritage Foundation. https://www.heritage.org/gender/commentary/ the-left-shunning-liberals-concerns-about-transgender-agenda’
Barrett, Ruth. (2016). Female Erasure: What You Need To Know About Gender Politics’ War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights. Tidal Time Publishing.
Boland, Barbara. (16 September, 2020). Study: As Many As 59 Million Displaced By America’s War On Terror. The American Conservative. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ study-as-many-as-59-million-displaced-by-americas-war-on-terror/
Cicero, Marcus T. (1998). The Republic and The Law. Oxford University Press. Freire, Paulo. (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Giubilini A, Minerva F. After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? Journal of Medical Ethics 2013;39:261-263. https://jme.bmj.com/content/39/5/261
Truth In Focus 