Columnist notes totalitarian tendencies of woke American social justice warriors

by WorldTribune Staff, September 18, 2020

Woke activists “have fallen headlong for authoritarianism,” a columnist noted.

In Ibram Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist”, currently one of the best sellers in America, the author “calls for some astonishingly autocratic policies,” Karl Zinsmeister, editor in chief of Philanthropy magazine, wrote in an op-ed for RealClearPolitics on Friday.

‘Their favored graffiti spray tag is ‘ACAB’ (All Cops Are Bastards). They want to defund and shut down police departments, not fix them. They call for lawmakers to ‘abolish ICE’ and fling our southern border wide open.’

Those policies would include the establishment of a federal Department of Anti-racism with veto power over any local, state, or federal policies considered racially inequitable by its bureaucrats. The author said the agency would also “investigate private racist policies” and “monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas … empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

No one in the agency would be appointed by or accountable to the president or Congress, Zinsmeister noted.

The author’s proposal would “tear up both the checks and balances on executive fiat in Washington and the protections for individual rights embedded in our Constitution,” Zinsmeister adding that social justice warriors (SJWs) take their cues on group conflict and oppression “directly from Marxism.”

The woke SJWs say white supremacism is universal in America, not an aberration, Zinsmeister wrote.

“Their favored graffiti spray tag is ‘ACAB’ (All Cops Are Bastards). They want to defund and shut down police departments, not fix them. They call for lawmakers to ‘abolish ICE’ and fling our southern border wide open.”

The leftist mob is driven by rage.

“Rage is an awful fuel for the gradual give-and-take needed to produce social progress in a non-authoritarian democracy,” Zinsmeister wrote. “Alas, the Americans under age 30 who are manning the barricades of identity socialism loathe messy give-and-take. They prefer, as columnist Bari Weiss has noted, to squash resisters. Revolution rather than reform is increasingly the goal.”

The rioters rampaging across America have also taken to personalizing disagreements, Zinsmeister noted.

“Protesters now regularly descend on the homes of people they disagree with. They hound them in restaurants. They harass family members. They release phone numbers and personal information online (‘doxing’). They get opponents disinvited from public events, and dismissed from public posts (‘deplatforming’).”

Zinsmeister continued: “Intellectual standardization of the mass media is another hint of totalist currents. Lexis-Nexis searches show that woke jargon and orthodoxies have become a uniform language within the media in recent years. The press ideal for generations — objectivity — is now attacked not only by agitators but by progressive journalists themselves as ‘a pillar of white supremacy.’ On stories touching upon race, transsexuality, immigration, and other identity topics, many reporters now profess that the goal should be ‘truth’ rather than objective discussion. The longstanding ideal of making newspapers and magazines mixed marketplaces of contending ideas, and letting readers decide issues for themselves, is now being savagely rejected by much of the press.

“Another indicator of the totalitarian temptations within today’s identity politics is the surging reality of violence. There is the psychic violence of vendettas pursued by Twitter hunting packs. There are the shout-downs, table-turnovers, and physical trashings that the non-woke now regularly face on campuses. Smashed buildings and statues, looting, and arson became commonplace in American cities this summer. And the paramilitary enforcers of identity politics increasingly carry out assaults like the recent beating of a Wisconsin state senator (a gay Democrat) for filming riots, and the killing of a Portland businessman for counter-protesting.”


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