Fighting the Hydra requires more than just fighting back - The Critical Insurrection

When fighting a Hydra, don't just fight back - The Critical Insurrection
Given the nature of the pro-regressive insurrection (see previous post) being waged against America - not the one being charged by Nancy Pelosi & the House Democrats, but the one they've been waging upon us through weaponized ideologies such as CRT (Critical Race Theory) - I urge a word of caution, that when fighting a Hydra, you have to do more than simply fight back. Because if you only cut off a head, like Common Core, while the other heads distract you into fighting them, each stump will grow two even more vicious heads, as with SEL & CRT. Most of all, the heads seek to distract you from discovering that as you cut one off, and cauterize its stump, it can't grow even one back, and continuing to do that, until you've severed the last head, and cauterized its' stump as well, then the immortal beast will actually die. All the distractions are there to keep us from realizing the actual target.

For instance, years ago when we were battling against Common Core, we began to be told that America needed to wage a campaign against bullies, because there were bullies, bullies everywhere around us, when in reality, other than those in Congress, bullying was no more of an issue then, than it ever had been before. But that distraction did enable SEL (Social Emotional Learning, an astonishingly flawed and ignorant concoction of 1990's educratic thinking), to grow into prominence through federal, state & local legislation, such as,

"...Federal policy has begun to incorporate social, emotional, and behavioral factors into education accountability metrics (e.g., ESSA: Every Student Succeeds Act), and school climate initiatives, antibullying work, positive behavior supports (e.g., PBIS), and discipline reform are increasingly influencing the day-to-day practice of schools and communities...."

, and as SEL became fully implemented as the central 'lens' of 'Critical Pedagogy', it helped CRT to grow into the very real threat which it has become today. So as you see the hydras writhing its several heads of 'Whiteness', 'diversity', and even 'Marxism' in our faces to distract us, remember that while those do need to be fought, we have to remember to finish the job, and that until we do that with each one, they will not only regrow, but multiply.

I'm going to keep these first few posts as short and to the point as my feeble powers of restraint can manage (I know, too late... sorry, best I can do), and as there are many excellent sources available either free online, or for minimal expense in books (I've added a page of links to books, online resources and videos, to the top of my blog 'Behind CRT'), I won't attempt to recreate the detail-wheel here, but I do want to highlight what I see so often being missed, because as important as those details are, the particular issues of the moment, aren't the revolution that's being waged against us, and missing that is why every apparent 'victory!' that the Right has celebrated over the last century, has resulted in its being replaced by at least two more fearsome heads in our culture and institutions, and as the creature now has us backed up to the edge of the cliff, if we fail to finish each fight, our 'victories' will end up flipping Reagan's dictum around to 'they win, we lose'.

I urge you - look beyond what is being waved around to distract us into still another fight. Focusing only on CRT is not enough. Focusing only on SEL, is not enough (do that, and you'll miss the Trauma-Informed Schools that are preparing to strike. H/T Marilee). Focusing on Marxism is not enough either, as any one thing which causes us to focus in too narrowly on only one particular or another, is keeping us from taking in the full nature of the beast, and without a good grasp of either the particular issue's nature, nor the full scope of its reach, those who're adept at using detailed definitions to evade and deny inconvenient facts, will find it exceedingly easy to dismiss the concerns we raise ('CRT?! That there's a college course, this is High School! We don't teach no college courses here! Ya'll need to git educated!').

We're like hunters walking along with our eyes on the ground following an unfamiliar set of tracks, thinking that the strange leathery tree trunks we keep bumping into, are isolated and random oddities, and it isn't until we begin looking upwards that we finally begin noticing that they're not as isolated as they seemed, and as we're looking up, and up, and up at what each one is tending towards, we finally begin to see them all as being legs of the gargantuan beast standing over us, with its multiple heads ready to strike at us, or perhaps just to flatten us under its weight.

The Hydra's wokery is not just in the schools, it's in the foundations and NGO's, it's in the 'Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer's that are popping up like weeds throughout the corporate world.. it's in the military, in the media, sports, entertainment, our churches, it's even in medicine now - can you name me a single institution or walk of life that it doesn't infest? Please? No, focusing on each issue as separate things is going to get us crushed. We need to see the bestial nature that's present in them all, we need to develop the ability to perceive that presence no matter what façade it's hiding behind, and then decisively confront it.

The good news is that there are telltale traits that help us to recognize and identify its presence and track its progress, whether the current head before us is CRT, SEL, Common Core, Marxism, or one of the many others. Someone that I've been fortunate enough to work with in the effort to halt this systemic madness, Dr. Mary Byrne, has been crisscrossing Missouri, speaking out against CRT - her presentation is full of substance, well presented, and I highly recommend your attending. There are three particular points which are actually in, or are at least implicit in her presentation, which I think are critically (ahem) important in recognizing, defending against, and combatting the 'tentacular monstrosity' we're facing:

1. Every Politically Correct and Woke effort that shocks and outrages you, while leaving you feeling that you shouldn't or can't respond to it, is intended to demoralize you.
2. Mis-identifying what America is and originally was, removes the restraints of Truth from those who seek to undermine your confidence and destroy it, which is their mission.
3. “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” - IOW: Divide and Conquer

So let's look closer at these points.

1) Demoralizing - This first point is one which is served by all of the 'critical theories' and the various '[race, sexuality, etc.] Pride!' & 'Spirit Murder!' type campaigns associated with Critical Race Theories, and they are intended to instill a sense of guilt in everyone else. Shelby Steele identified that point here, in how to push back against those in power who're promoting it,

"...“I think they have to begin with the understanding that Critical Race Theory is a device designed to capture white guilt. It has no other meaning, no other purpose, no other function than that. It wants to capture, to once again accuse whites of racism,” Steele said.

Steele went on to explain that once CRT was used to convince everyone that structural racism had bled into every aspect of American life, the goal was to use the guilt it created to advance black Americans by creating entitlements for them. “It’s a structural systemic society-wide problem and to the extent of its breadth, it owes us as blacks entitlement,” he added.
“What bothers me most is that the whites — we have been doing this now for 70 years, and whites still don’t get the point,” Steele continued. “You are being had. You are being shaken down over a history that you had nothing to do with, and there has to be some standing up there.”

As those who brainwash captives know all too well, if you can get someone to repeatedly feel guilt for something they had no hand in, they become demoralized. Pay special attention to the point of that word, of the 'moral' being removed from you - there's far more to being demoralized than the superficial appearance of being depressed. Without the moral certainty of being aligned with what is right & wrong, a person is left with nothing more than the sensations of the moment to be guided by, the materialist and animalistic pleasure & pain, which leaves you with no sense of having anything that's worth aspiring to or defending. The notion that all values are of equal 'value', means that all of our values - that which we actively pursue or try to hold on to - are only of physical sensations and tastes with no higher element of truth or wisdom to raise them above what is false and foolhardy. That materialistic notion is not an 'ideal' of Tolerance, it is the viciously intolerant means of wiping out three thousand years of slow and painful progress in the West, so as to return us to the life and rule of brute force. When we even innocently accept that premise, and are repeatedly being hit with that 'ideal', the person who accepts that, cannot help but lose their respect for themselves and for others as they have already lost their respect for the nature of being Human. Not surprisingly, such a person as that is far more easily manipulated into doing whatever it is that 'those who know best', want them to do, for this or that shallow 'benefit' or reward.

Note: Anyone claiming to be an 'expert' who tells you that no value is of more value than any other value, has just told you that their expertise is of no value - treat them accordingly.

What Shelby Steele puts as "...You are being shaken down", a P.T. Barnum might've put more like this: 'You can't cheat a moral man, so... get him to feel immoral, and that sucker is all yours.' .

Don't accept the guilt that they're handing out - and don't make the mistake of thinking that it's easy to refuse it. Most decent people are inclined to politely defer to others - how often have you said "Oh, sorry, excuse me", over something such as reaching for the same item on a shelf, or having gotten to a door first? As you did nothing wrong, you don't actually sorry, it's simply a common means of demonstrating politeness and minding your manners. There's of course not only nothing wrong with that, but it's a vital habit which demonstrates your presumption that the other person is worthy of being treated respectfully, and such civility is exceedingly important as a societal norm. It's difficult for most decent people to practice what in normal situations would be seen as bad manners. The proponents of CRT and its like count on our reflexive use of manners, and as a polite response is extended to those who are truly unworthy of that respect, it will be maliciously twisted by them into a chokehold of obligatory guilt, and they know that they can count on your not withdrawing from it, out of fear of appearing rude.

You've seen that scenario playing out across the flaming summer of 2020, in something like this:

BLM: "Black Lives Matter!"
You: "Well of course they do, I certainly agree, and I'm very sorry that you've been treated so badly. Every life is valuable, and..."
BLM: "That's racist!"
You: "Oh! I'm so very sorry, I didn't mean..."
BLM: "You 're inherently racist and promoting 'whiteness' and..."

IOW, while empathy is laudable, and in some contexts, sympathy, if you permit yourself to be beaten up with it, as Shelby Steele put it, "You are being had. You are being shaken down..." Don't allow your decency to be flipped into a chokehold against you.

2) Mis-Identification -The second issue, is to get you to go along with misidentifying what America and Western Civilization are, which requires dividing, if not atomizing, the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian nature of that which it developed through. I noted in a post way back in 2006, that although America didn't begin with the very religious minded Pilgrims, America absolutely was and still is the fruit of the Greco/Roman & Judeo/Christian marriage which joined those ideals into one flesh, so to speak; each complements the other, and it's through their union that the nature of Western Civilization emerges.

It is ludicrous to say that America was not founded on Judeo-Christian principles, as those principles were explicitly used, studied, and implemented by those who founded it; but neither is it possible to say that America is a Judeo-Christian nation while then trying to minimize or ignore its Greco/Roman nature. The Greco-Roman philosophers and political figures that I typically focus on, share more than a hyphenated relationship of historical happenstance with our Judeo/Christian half - the Bible contains numerous passages that echo the fundamental Roman dictums of law, such as 'hear the other side', and the Greek's love of wisdom ('Philosophy' is the love of wisdom), such as Proverbs 8-9, and much more that is central to the nature of our Western understanding of Natural Law and Justice. Western Civilization isn't simply a patchwork of parts awkwardly tacked together, but is the result of the union of its parental sources, and it is that one flesh that the forces arrayed against us are focused upon putting asunder.

Out of that union came what first became known as Liberalism (not what typically goes by that name today), which in part grew out of the ideas that Thomas Hooker used to form history's first written constitution from (Solon, the Spartans, Rome's tables, were of a different matter), in the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which was implemented around 1639:

"...the Connecticut founders did something different from their Puritan ancestors: the British monarch was not acknowledged as the authorizing agent of the document, as he was in the Mayflower Compact. There is no mention of the monarch anywhere in the agreement. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut lists a fundamental right – and one that was not an Englishman’s right – the right to create the form of government under which one shall live...."

, ideas which were later expanded upon in John Locke's 2nd Treatise on Civil Government, which amounted to efforts to translate the West's Judeo-Christian religious ideals of what is good and true - that every individual is of equal value before God, valuing even their power to choose to disobey God - into a framework of practical Greco-Roman political philosophy, which required subordinating power to rational systems of law, steadied by ethical and moral understanding, and anchored around Property as an objective result of our ideas in action.

That system, our system, requires the influence of both halves of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian traditions - their ideals inform the mechanics, and the mechanics lose their cohesion & purpose without the defining limits of those ideals - the whole cannot function properly without all of its parts.

These are critically important points for us to remember... which is why they are dismissed, ignored and/or ridiculed by those we've foolishly entrusted to teach them to us.

A prime example of what results from excluding one or more of those 'parts', is on display in the evil twin of that original Liberalism, which I collectively refer to as Pro-Regressivism, which is what our modern Left is the rotten fruit of. Through multiple waves of influence from Rousseauism, Utilitarianism, Positivism, Marxism, Pragmatism, Progressivism & Economics (and not a little bit of Libertarianism) they each seek to alter, exclude, or replace one or more parts of our whole, and the resulting mutation seeks to divide the West's ideals through a twisted reflection of them. That mutant is hell bent on rationalizing the use of power over others 'for their own good', or 'for the greater good'', which conveniently entails reducing property to a status of mere physical possessions, severed from those rights that are inherent in our nature, and which can then only be secured by the power of force alone, as directed by those experts 'who know best'.

It is also critically important to recognize the pivot of foundational ideals which CRT is a culmination of, that of turning away from the traditional Western pillar of Truth, to the modernist pillar of Power. If you look past their superficial virtue signaling, you'll see that power centric ideology in action - and always inciting action - which is behind every 'value' which they've been instilling into the minds of students, especially of college students, since at least the 1990's. That pivot is what you can see has just been performed in this, from Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic:

"... critical race theory calls into question the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law.” pg 3,
, and that
“...Crits [Critical Race Theorists] are highly suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights....”p. 23.

This is an attack on the heart and soul of America, and the West, and it is nothing short of a progressive insurrection. See:Critical Race Theory: A Two-page Overview

And finally,

3) The issue is never the issue - The third, and in some ways the most important point (at least as concerns fighting back), comes from what former Communist activist, David Horowitz, pointed out as being a central mindset and tactic of the Left, in relating this anecdote, that:

“Saul Alinsky, the radical organizer and mentor of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, used to ask his new followers why they wanted to become community organizers. They would respond with idealistic claims that they wanted to help the poor and oppressed. Then Alinsky would scream at them like a Marine Corps drill instructor, “No! You want to organize for power!” That’s the way the SDS radicals at the University of Texas approached the abortion issue—as a means to power, or, in Margaret Sanger’s words, to remake the world. As a writer in the 1960s radical SDS publication New Left Notes put it, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

, and what 'the issue is never the issue' means, is that we need to be aware that when, for instance, we are told that men can identify as women, or that all whites are racist, neither transgenderism nor whites are the issue, but are only a tactic that's being used to sow division, and to prevent reasonable discussions between those who might recoil at those thoughts, and those others who might see some aspect of it that they'd like to discuss - and preventing that discussion, is the point of phrases such as 'Black Lives Matter!', 'Men can have periods!', 'Believe all Women!'. That is the revolution that is always the issue, and driving that forward, severing one person from another as bitterly as possible, is their preferred manner of employing that tactic which was already old when Caesar made it famous as:

"divide and conquer"

, and it's the tactic which Marx made central to his misosophy (the hatred of wisdom, as opposed to Philosophy, which is the love of wisdom), which in his hands was class conflict, and in the Critical Racist's is racial conflict, but in all of their hands, they seek division by fundamental conflict, so as to conquer.

As mentioned above, the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' was not chosen to support the lives of blacks. The founders of the group, 'trained Marxists' that they admittedly are, sought to sow division into our lives by choosing words that were sure to draw sympathy from most, while pitting them against those who'd rationally affirm that sentiment by extending it more broadly into all of our lives. The moment that happens, a tripwire is triggered and any attempt at having reasonable discussion, are framed as either 'All lives Matter' or 'Black Lives Matter', which they've spun into mutually exclusive & opposing positions which are deliberately insulting to the other, which at least one side of which will eagerly find great offense in. 

Through the expert fanning of those rhetorical flames over the last year, our divisions have been magnified beyond all measure to the point firestorms of destruction having flowed abundantly from. BLM and the other profa ('antifa' & BLM are Pro-Fascists) have exploited the misery that was certain to follow from the conflicts they so carefully arranged for, and that is who they are.

Summing up and taking aim

So to restate the three points from above into something to keep in mind, and to look for:

1. Every outrageous PC & Woke statement of relativism & toleration, of 'diversity, equity & inclusion', demands your acceptance and 'allyship' of them in order to demoralize you.
2. America is a nation of ideas that are rooted in the pursuit of Truth; its Pro-Regressive opponents (including many nominally on The Right), are rooted in & upon the pursuit of Power, and as such Lies are seen as useful tools for undermining your confidence, and ultimately bringing America and Western Civilization to an end.
3. Always remember that this is active in every issue, and that: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” - IOW: Divide and Conquer

It's not enough to only fight back against them, we have to strike it at its root and cauterize the stump to prevent it from re-growing, and that requires actual arguments, not just the returning of insults & smackdowns. To do that we need to know, and be able to have and hold, an ideal that we can look up towards, one which is worth fighting for, and anything which undermines that, furthers the Pro-Regressive revolution. Leftists are at their most effective when they hit upon a word or phrase of bait that everyone leaps at, and any and every repetition of it divides us into being for or against it, and the more effective bait are those which trumpet a virtue that they're designed to destroy.

In just one or two shallow words as those mentioned above, they seek to hit propagandistic gold of satisfying superficiality, that leaves most people either uninterested in, or fearful of, looking beneath the surface for any further argument or deeper meaning. As they deploy a phrase as "The issue", it distracts and diverts all opposition into one rhetorical dead-end alley after another, where having already spun the most likely objections to make dissenters sound foolish, the Left is able to keep all opponents boxed up and arguing on and on over their superficial labels, and as its opponents never quite grasp the nature of the issues that have been arrayed against them, the revolution continues to advance.

There's something about our modern way of thinking that has made us susceptible to this strategy, even to the point of most otherwise sensible people assisting the radical left in peddling their activism as if it were education, and that is what is enabling them to bury us under layers and layers of 'diversity, equity & inclusion'. 

There's more involved in holding onto our ideals while engaging with and fighting the hydra, and it needs to be identified in order to be able to secure America within American's minds, and that includes recognizing the means by which our minds are sometimes changed for the worst by the very methods that we've assumed will improve us for the best. We need to relearn how to reach into the depths, even as we're being urged to hurriedly skate across the surface of all that we're being told.

Over the next few posts we'll get into that, and how to start turning issues like CRT back against those who're baiting us with them.