You cannot be psychologically healthy in an unfree society–especially in a dictatorship, which we are becoming. Mental health requires stability, reason, integrity. You need a government that will protect your physical self and property, as an absolute. Our present government does so selectively, as we’re seeing in cities where racist terrorists run free and others are fined or jailed for going to church or operating a business. Trump supporters who are nonviolent are arrested and prosecuted with “January 6” as the excuse, while violent thugs are lifted to the status of heroes.

This is not an atmosphere for serenity and rationality, two key components of mental health. The cultural and political elites are dividing us, pitting us against each other. I normally might like you, but I see you wearing a face diaper and know you’re an idiot. You might like me and benefit from knowing me; but your race and my race are different, and the elites have pounded into our psyches that we may only relate to each other as victim and victimizer–by virtue of race alone. The list goes on. It’s increasingly impossible to expect a mentally sane society, or even to aim for one, when so much in our government and cultural influences are rotten to the core.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

For the left, free speech was simply a means to gain power. The left claimed free speech for their subversive intentions. Now that they have achieved control on what can be said, denying freedom of speech to the rest of us is the way they control the narrative.

It is extraordinary that big business, long championed by conservatives and libertarians—the main groups whose speech is censored and suppressed often with lost of employment—is in league with the left in using censorship to control what Americans hear and think and in requiring white employees to submit to indoctrination that they are racists and must step aside for the black people they have oppressed.

You can see the “step aside” everywhere—university admissions, employment, promotion, the right to loot and burn down shopping districts of blue cities, and even in corporate advertisements. Despite the fact that white persons are still 60-70% of the US population only black models are used in corporate advertisements unless the corporations are pushing interracial marriage, which is a way to eliminate whiteness. In these ads the women are white and the men are black. https://counter-currents.com/2018/03/the-war-against-whites-in-advertising/.

It is certainly not more profitable to market to black persons than to white persons. It is as if US corporations do not want to reach white consumers in their ads. Anti-white ideologies have prevailed even over corporate greed! That should scare you to death.

Two decades ago when I pointed out that President George W. Bush’s assault on habeas corpus defied the US Constitution and returned Americans to the dungeons of the medieval era people were too focused on the “terrorist threat” to see the real threat.

No one wanted the US Constitution—a “mere scrap of paper” according to President Bush— to interfere with the “war on terror” and revenge on the Muslims who were framed in a false flag 9/11 in order that the Middle East could be destroyed for Israel.

When I pointed out that President Obama’s assertion of the power to execute American citizens on suspicion alone without due process of law amounted to murder by arbitrary power, no one wanted to hear any criticism of “America’s First Black President.” Criticism of Obama was considered racism.

Now it is the First Amendment that is being banned as racist. Free speech allows people to speak facts. But facts contrary to the ideological narrative are racist and cannot be spoken. In destroyed America today wokes even forbid the use of gender pronouns. If you call a female “female” or “her” you are in violation of speech codes, have committed a hate crime against transgendered, and are a candidate for being censored and cancelled.

And this country is said to be “indispensable,” “the light of the world,” the arbiter of truth and freedom, the hope of the world even as the US Constitution, which once gave hope to the world, is destroyed.

In America today white Americans no longer have the protection of the US Constitution. White Americans are oppressors to be “eliminated” in order that black people can escape oppression.

If you want to see your near future, read The Camp of the Saints.

America has failed itself as a country and its people as citizens. There is no community, no unity. White liberals in blue states look down on Republicans in red states as “white supremacists,” “domestic terrorists,” and misogynists. Blacks and “people of color” are taught by white liberals to hate white people. Blue school boards require critical race theory—a denunciation of white people and Western civilization—to be programmed into kids in taxpayer funded public schools and universities. The private schools and universities also preach the evils of whiteness.

Today in the Disunited States the main function of public and private education is the demonization of white people and Western civilization. Instead of being enculturated, American youth are taught hatred of their country and guilt for being white. They are brainwashed against themselves and their country.

The US, to which the allegiance of its population is being destroyed, masquerades as a superpower, the exceptional country whose hegemony is justified by its exceptionalism.

But this alleged “exceptionalism” is belied by the US teaching its soldiers, the main fighting component of which consists of white males, that they are racist, misogynist pigs who oppress and abuse women and blacks. If the indoctrination succeeds, how can this military force oppress people of color in the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America?

If this indoctrination does not succeed, how can the anti-Americans in Washington who rule us expect a white male military, whom Washington has shown that it hates, to fight for Washington?

Is appointing a black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff enough? Are officers’ hopes of making major and lieutenant general, and becoming in retirement consultants to the Pentagon and defense contractors enough?

Will they all sell out their country for money?

Where are the Smedley Butlers today?

The United States is the Constitution. If the Constitution is destroyed, the United States is destroyed. That destruction is almost complete.

Celebrate Pride with us as we work together for change. Discover LGBTQI+ at Microsoft.” My Microsoft Windows program keeps spouting this propaganda. What does this have to do with operating a computer? America already protects equal rights for gay and lesbian people. We have gay marriage. I actually supported those things — as a supporter of rights of the individual, not because some woke corporate fascist told me to do so. Exactly what “change” is needed now? I don’t understand. Be more specific, Microsoft. What kind of “change” do you have in mind?

What does being gay/lesbian or anything else have to do with the totalitarianism you’re seeking to impose on us all (gay AND straight) through wiping out property rights, wiping out the First and Second Amendments, eradicating election integrity by rigging election outcomes, enslaving people with experimental vaccine and mask mandates, and wiping out economic freedom so bureaucrats and politicians may determine who gets wealthy and who does not? Why the hell do I have to support THAT kind of change just because I own a Microsoft Windows program? And why the hell are the policies of Stalin, Mao and Hitler to be bundled in with the choice to have sex, or romantic relations, with any consenting adult you choose?

It’s like living in the adult version of kindergarten … a very sinister kindergarten, for sure.

Microsoft (and Google, Facebook, Twitter, all of you): Stick with what you know. And stay the hell away from my rights!

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

In the spring of 2015, as ISIS forces made their way to the historic Syrian city of Palmyra, town officials became concerned for the safety of their historic treasures, which included priceless statuary and other artifacts from antiquity. Knowing that ISIS militants disdain the heritage of the past, and consider statues a form of idolatry, city officials sought to save their treasures from pillage by hiding them outside the city.

Even though ISIS jihadists believe artworks to be idolatrous, they are not above selling them on the black market to turn a quick profit. That is exactly what they intended to do with Palmyra’s treasures. So when they arrived and found the museums empty, they abducted Khaled al-Asaad, an 82-year-old archeologist, historian, and museum curator who had served for more than fifty years as head of antiquities in Palmyra. For a month, they interrogated and tortured al-Asaad, hoping to make him reveal the hiding place of the antiquities. But the 82-year-old scholar withstood them. Finally, when the militants realized they could not break him, they cut off al-Asaad’s head and hung his mutilated body on a column in a main square. They also placed a board in front of his body declaring that he had served as “the director of idolatry” and had represented Syria at “infidel conferences.”

What happened in Palmyra was not an isolated incident, except perhaps with regard to the fortitude with which the jihadists were resisted. At other historic sites, ISIS militants destroyed precious art with frenzy, sometimes even using power equipment to demolish cultural artifacts.

The Crusade Against Cultural Memory

ISIS exemplifies a radical form of cancel culture that seeks to eradicate all memory of anything beyond its movement. Its militants have mobilized mass hysteria to destroy not only physical artworks, but also the institutions that support the liberal arts.

Such hatred of art is not limited to Islam. In the 1650s, after Oliver ­Cromwell took control of Great Britain as Lord Protector, his men roamed the land with long poles, which they used to shatter stained-glass art in the high windows of ancient cathedrals. Cromwell, too, sought to eradicate much of the past, particularly where cultural memory had found expression in art and Christian holidays. Under the Protectorate he set up, the liberal arts were carefully regulated, and the theater was banned altogether.

Modern revolutionary movements have exhibited the same tendency. From the French Revolution through to the various Communist revolutions of the twentieth century, a recurring feature has been the attempt to purify society from past traditions and to build a new society from scratch. Using oversimplified ideologies and sloganeering, these movements whipped up the masses into a frenzy, mobilizing them to the mission of overthrowing existing structures and canceling cultural memory.

Fundamentalism can be religious or anti-religious. ISIS fundamentalists are religious (but anti-Christian), while Communist fundamentalists were virulently anti-religion. Regardless of the specifics of their worldviews, fundamentalist movements all seek to cancel the past by erasing cultural memory and by attacking the forms and institutions through which that memory is carried.

A Rising New Fundamentalist Threat

In late 2016 and early 2017, the Syrian Army recaptured the city of Palmyra, with help from the United States and Russia. Finding that ISIS forces had destroyed historic buildings, tombs, and temples, the authorities began a massive restoration effort.

Ironically, even as American forces were fighting against fundamentalism in the Middle East, a new form of it was rising within the United States itself. This new form of fundamentalism is subtle, disguising its agenda in the language of liberalism even as it seeks to destroy the liberal arts.

The new fundamentalism goes by various names, including wokeness, radical liberalism, critical theory, and progressivism. In this article we will simply refer to it as “Woke Fundamentalism,” or Wokeism for short.

Wokeism represents our own version of what happened in Palmyra, complete with high-profile destruction of statuary. Like ISIS, the Woke target zones of cultural significance, such as universities and historic sites. And while they do not behead people, they whip up mass hysteria to try to take down entire disciplines and to ruin the careers of people deemed insufficiently woke. Above all, Woke Fundamentalism is a virulent version of cancel culture, which aims to send Western civilization down the memory hole.

Drawn from the Communist Playbook

Last October, when woke protestors tore down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt in Portland, Oregon, their destructive mission was obvious. What is less obvious is the more subtle way Wokeism has been attacking the liberal arts by undermining the notion that the arts have intrinsic value. The Woke follow Karl Marx, who taught that the liberal arts have merely extrinsic value as instruments that can be used to achieve various pragmatic goals.

Marxists sought, and seek, to cancel the liberal arts by redefining them in purely instrumental terms. A hallmark of twentieth-century experiments in Marxism was the effort to channel man’s aesthetic faculties to purely useful ends, and to insist that works of imagination and beauty should be created and/or used only as tools to serve the goals of the state. The Soviets sanctioned a new type of art known as “socialist realism,” which regulated expression, glorified technology, and reduced art to a purely didactic function. The Marxist philosopher and revolutionary Georgi Plekhanov set the tone for the new mood when he declared that the value of art lay in its social usefulness: “There can be no doubt that art acquires a social significance only insofar as it depicts, evokes, or conveys actions, emotions, and events that are of significance to society.”

Woke Fundamentalism has been drawing from the Communist playbook by treating the liberal arts as if their value is merely instrumental in advancing social-justice agendas. Among the Woke, the great literary, visual, and musical artworks of our tradition are valued purely for their didactic function in advancing a narrow range of political concerns, including feminism, critical race theory, post-colonialism, queer theory, and so on. By treating these disciplines in this way, the Woke leave the disciplines of higher learning in place even as they pragmatize and polemicize them, hollowing out their content so that these disciplines become little more than weapons in the hands of social justice warriors. Meanwhile, scholars who insist on the older view, that the liberal arts are ends rather than simply means, risk having their careers destroyed and their reputations ruined.

Earlier this year, at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies, we got a sense of how tense this conflict has become. In an address to a panel of classicists, Dr. Mary Williams argued that the classics have more than instrumental value, saying, “Maybe we should start defending our discipline in and of itself, and saying it’s Western civilization, it matters.” She was roundly rebuked for these and other comments before being kicked out of the meeting.

The Saga of Dan-el Peralta

Dr. Williams’s main critic was Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an associate professor of classics at Princeton University. Peralta serves as an interesting case study in how the Woke radicalize academics by attacking the very thing that makes them good scholars in the first place, namely, love for their subjects.

In February the New York Times ran a glowing profile on Peralta, whose career emerged out of a youthful love for Greece and Rome and a desire to be transformed by the classics. At first he studied the classics simply because he loved the subject and believed the discipline had value in and of itself. But in college, when he announced his decision to major in the classics, he received push-back from some of his closest friends. You see, Peralta is black, and his friends wanted to know how his study of the classics would help the cause of social justice. If the classics could not help with an activist agenda, were they a worthy pursuit for a black man?

Peralta at first responded to these concerns by arguing that the classics were intrinsically valuable, regardless of their political utility. But then his perspective began to shift. The Times profile reports that he became increasingly troubled by the perceived lack of practical utility in the classics, until he finally abandoned the position that the literature of Greece and Rome has inherent value.

He found he wasn’t completely satisfied by his own arguments. The question of classics’ utility was not a trivial one. How could he take his education in Latin and Greek and make it into something liberatory? “That became the most urgent question that guided me through my undergraduate years and beyond,” Padilla said.¹

After coming to these realizations, Peralta tried to unlearn much of his earlier education. “I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,” he said.

Now that Peralta believes the classics possess a merely instrumental value within the context of activism, what type of scholarship is he engaging in? Among other things, he is now trying to bring attention to the problem of “whiteness” in the classics. Greek and Roman language and literature are intrinsically bound up with white supremacy, he teaches. This is part of his larger agenda of woke activism, and his reduction of classical scholarship to a tool for political and social ends.

Peralta is only one academic, but he represents a consensus among the Woke in academia that their various disciplines—from classics to history to art to literature—should be pragmatized and politicized. In these efforts, the richness and complexity of these disciplines are being reduced to a handful of simple formulae about race or gender.

Hollowed Out from Within

The reduction of the liberal arts into tools for social and political utility is just as destructive as ISIS’s rampage through historical sites. In fact, woke iconoclasm and anti-intellectualism are actually more sinister than book-burning and statue-crushing, for they allow institutions of higher learning to continue operating even as they are being subverted.

The physical destruction of artworks and books will not be resisted if people become convinced that such things have no value anyway. And that is exactly what the Woke seek to do as they propagandize university students with the notion that the liberal arts should be valued only as means to ends. When the study of Western civilization—together with its art, literature, and music—becomes simply another tool for woke activism, then even if these disciplines remain formally in place, they have effectively been cancelled.

In the battle to preserve the riches of our civilization, we need more people like Khaled al-Asaad, who courageously stood against the despoilers to defend his cultural heritage.

Robin Phillips, Salvo Magazine

If you appease people who are out to destroy you, then you make it easier for them to destroy you. If you meet them halfway, or even 1 percent of the way, they are determined to destroy you, 100 percent, regardless. When people declare war on all that you hold dear, they have attacked you personally, even if they have never met you. They are coming for you, through the destruction of all your liberty and property, and they mean to obliterate you if you don’t submit to their undiluted tyranny. At some point, you must figure out how to win, and how to decisively defeat them — because they, and their kind, are never going to stop.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason