On July 14th this year, Bari Weiss sent in her resignation letter to The New York Times editor, A. G. Sulzberger. Ms. Weiss, had been brought into the newspaper after the 2016 election with the task of bringing in voices that would otherwise not appear in its pages. After a few years, she concluded the publisher was not what it once was, or perceived to be: the golden standard of journalism. Instead it had become an illiberal haven, where the truth was not treated as something to be discovered, but as an “orthodoxy known to an enlightened few whose job was to inform everyone else;” as she puts it on her resignation letter.
The writer describes the work environment she had to endure as someone who considers herself a political centrist. She was called a racist and a Nazi, her co-workers constantly demeaning her through the company’s Slack where editors would sometimes contribute; those who were perceived to be friendly to her were to be badgered by others. Sometimes, these attacks would become public, where other employees would openly smear her as a liar on Twitter.
What Ms. Weiss is describing is the cultural war the United States is experiencing as a nation, and she is experiencing in her own skin.
A cultural war is a cultural conflict between social groups and their struggle for dominance where their values, practices, and belief systems are at play. This is not a “live and let live” type of scenario; and in the case we are living in the United States today, those who most often call for inclusion and diversity, are those who are desperately trying to get rid of diversity of thought.
The question is, don’t they see the contradiction in their actions? Don’t they see that while they call themselves liberal, they are anything but that? Perhaps it has something to do with the pervasive Marxist philosophy of Critical Theory that has invaded our culture, and has been taught to university students for generations in order to reach this critical point of division. The philosophy seeks to see society through the lens of power dynamics. And this targets all aspects of society, be it art, law, relationships or history, which are observed as if there were always an oppressor and an oppressed. This especially manifests itself today in the United States through gender and through race. The simplified implication is that the power is with the oppressor and the virtue with the oppressed.
Therefore, anything you do, as the oppressed against the oppressor will be justified and righteous. Bullying, violence, harassment, all justifiable because it is a necessary justice. At least that is the case in the minds of those who believe in this theory, be it subtly or fully. The oppressor can do nothing right, and the only way to remedy the situation would be to inverse the power dynamics, and have the oppressed become the oppressor.
This brings up the question, wouldn’t that then result in a vicious cycle? Yes. In fact, current cultural icon that the American progressives champion, Ibram X. Kendi, suggests exactly that in his best-selling book “How to be an Anti-Racist,” where he writes: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Robyn DiAngelo, an avowed racist and writer of White Fragility, another best-selling book, insists that to deny being racist, is in fact proof of racism. These two people are currently promoted as changemakers, and moral voices of the progressive left.
It seems “progressives,” keep drifting further left with no one to stop them, the risk of being seen as a bigot is too great, as they eat their own. If you are a member of the left, yet dare speak against their increasing attachment to identity politics, you will be tar-and-feathered and cancelled. Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson, has called this out and said that the right has found a way to identify markers for when people go too far and he has said that it is “ethically incumbent, of those who are liberal or left leaning, to identify the markers of pathological extremism on the left, and to distinguish themselves from those people,” and he has said that that is not happening. The fear of being pushed out of the group is too great.
This is a movement where leftist academic intellectuals even call into question mathematical truths such as 2+2=4, because to them, math is a social construct. Gender, apparently, is also a social construct. To them there is no such thing as gender, but simultaneously there are an infinite number of genders. If you oppose these ideas and attempt to uphold traditional values, you are called a bigot, retrograde, archaic. To quote Professor Peterson: “Normalcy itself is being rejected and pathologized, while pathologies themselves are being normalized.”
We are living in a time where we can alter our concept of reality on a whim or on “our feelings.” Herein lies the culture war, a fight to preserve our concept of reality, or to turn everything in its head. To destroy. We have seen the conflict in the fight for the meaning of words on our social media platforms and our media, but even in our streets, where social justice warriors sought to erase history from our eyes by mere destruction.
The message is that police officers are evil, the message is that criminals have a right to resist being arrested, the message is that white people are inherently evil and the only way to atone is to give away their power, and fight those who won’t, the message is that men are a problem for women and for this country. The message is that the United States is a fundamentally evil country, which has to be burned to the ground so that something else can be born, something “better.” The message seeks to divide, create chaos, and destroy the history of a nation that has always stood as a beacon of hope for many across the world.
The cultural battle is now between those who want to preserve that history, the nation, and even reality itself. It’s between traditionalists, true classical liberals, and those who knowingly or unknowingly are paving the way for Marxism by embracing its philosophies.
