UK Conservative Party Chairman Oliver Dowden recently spoke at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. decrying the pernicious “woke” ideology.  He describes the ridiculous theories and the dangers to Western democracies at this historical moment. Below is an excerpted transcript of his speech in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T Tyler Dowden and conservatives.com.

For nearly half a century “Heritage” has been central to the revival of conservatism. It has always flown the flag for limited government, for free markets and for individual responsibility. And as someone who grew up under Thatcher and Reagan I am proud to say that those values shaped my politics.  So, it is a huge privilege to be here speaking to you as Chairman of the Conservative Party the oldest and most successful political party in the history of the democratic world.

And the tireless work of institutions such as Heritage in promoting those values is becoming more important, not less. Today, a social media mob can cancel you merely because you have dared to challenge one of the Left’s fashionable nostrums. The enemies of the West are finding fresh confidence in their eternal battle against liberty.

So, conservatives themselves must find the confidence to mount a vigorous defence of the values of a free society. In a speech that is really remarkable for its foresight years before many had woken up to the fragility of the West’s victory in the Cold War Margaret Thatcher warned of a tendency of democracies to relax when the worst appears to be over.

She warned that new dangers to the West were also being ignored. Now, that is certainly true for China. The idea that Beijing’s partial embrace of free markets would automatically lead to greater social and personal political freedoms has proved to be breathtakingly naive. The world watches the relationship between America and its allies not only must we stand together we must be seen to stand together.

But there is another dimension to this crisis afflicting the West that she could not have foreseen. Rogue states are seeking to challenge the international order.

And at the precise point when our resolve ought to be strongest a pernicious new ideology is sweeping our societies.

An ideology that if not confronted threatens to rob us of the self-confidence we need to uphold those very values. It goes by many names. In Britain, its adherents sometimes describe themselves as “social justice warriors”.

They claim to be “woke”, awakened to the so-called truths of our societies. But wherever they are found they pursue a common policy inimical to freedom. In their analysis free speech is not a fundamental right necessary for the discovery of truth. To them it is a dangerous weapon that should be curtailed to prevent “harm”. “Free speech is hate speech” is one of their more bizarre slogans.

Each of us is accorded a level of “privilege”, that has nothing to do with our own personal struggles, but is based on our membership of a particular group. So, by their own shallow logic: as a man who went to Cambridge University and who now serves in the British Cabinet, I am a pinnacle of so-called “privilege”. It is apparently completely irrelevant to them that my parents were a shop worker and a factory worker who lost his job during a recession.

If I am privileged it is because I have a loving family and enjoyed an excellent education at my local state community school. But even to question my supposed privilege is deemed to be proof of how privileged I am.

Now, you might have noticed that the woke warriors take a particularly interest in history. Clearly history is a living subject, one that will inevitably be revised. But these activists are not interested in real scholarship or nuance or in explaining the context of the bad things that our ancestors did alongside the good. They are engaged in a form of Maoism determined to expunge large parts of our past in its entirety.

For them, nothing is sacred. Winston Churchill was central to the Allied victory in a fight for survival against Nazi tyranny. Yet some seek to trash his whole reputation and deface monuments to him in wanton acts of iconoclastic fury.

It is tempting to assume that this onslaught can be passed off as a passing fad. That it is so ridiculous so detached from what the majority think – and many have argued this – that it can simply be ignored. Universities from which so much of this unthinking revisionism has emerged have, of course, for decades been prey to Left-wing excesses. There has always been a tendency among cultural and educational elites to serve their own interests rather than serve the public at large. And of course, we conservatives have frequently confronted it.

But this ideology is now everywhere. It’s in our universities but also, in our schools. In government bodies but also in corporations. In social science faculties but also, in the hard sciences.

But I tell you, it is a dangerous form of decadence. Just when our attention should be focused on external foes we seem to have entered this period of extreme introspection and self-criticism and it really does threaten to sap our societies of their own self-confidence. Just when we should be showcasing the vitality of our values and the strength of democratic societies, we seem to be willing to abandon those values for the sake of appeasing this new groupthink.

There are several interlinked dangers to all of this.

To begin with, perhaps an obvious one. Those of us who grew up under Thatcher and Reagan or indeed, under Roosevelt and Churchill, were inspired by those leaders. But we also had an instinctive pride in our national story, a pride that joined even political opponents in a common sense of endeavour. But if they cease to be sources of pride that unite diverse population in a common understanding of who we are and what we stand for, then we lose that essential unity of purpose.

And it is particularly striking that the two countries, the United Kingdom and the United States, where the woke agenda is pursued the most aggressively, those are also very same countries where patriotism is most open and welcoming. Why on earth else would we be such magnets for migrants seeking to build a better life on our shores?

In Britain first, second and third generation migrants are among the most fervent champions of the countries they have chosen to call their own home. Yet increasingly they are told that the pride they feel is somehow misplaced. Or even worse than that, and even more offensively, that their patriotism is some kind of “false consciousness”.

Moreover this woke ideology encourages a bizarre form of moral relativism, a view that western nations are so compromised that they have no right to denounce the rogue states of today. For all their fury at historical “imperialism” , these activists have absolutely nothing to say about Vladimir Putin’s modern-day empire-building. Indeed, one of the perversities of this worldview is that the “imperialist” West is always at fault, even if that is in standing up for a nation that has experienced the horrors of life under an actual evil empire, in our own living memory.

And yet day by day that worldview gains traction in elite circles. We risk a collapse in resolve if all we hear is that our societies are monstrous, unjust, oppressive. Why on earth would anyone fight to sustain them? It’s a narrative that almost guarantees demoralisation and despair. And of course there is an opportunity cost of our irrational introspection. A West confident in its values would not be obsessing over pronouns or indeed, seeking to decolonise mathematics. Now you might say that’s rather difficult when the numerals we use are actually Arabic, but I’ll leave that to others to explain.

The West should be pointing out to would-be aggressors the strength of the values of a free society even in the most desperate of circumstances. To the Hong Kongers fighting for their rights in the face of extra ordinary odds. To the people of Ukraine determined that their nation should have the right to determine its future. To the women of Afghanistan prepared to defy Taliban rule even at the risk of their own lives.

Yet we allow ourselves to be obsessed by what divides us rather than what unites us. And, it shouldn’t just be conservatives who stand up for what made the West great. There was, of course, a time not very long ago when the mainstream Left was just as committed to free speech as the Right. Or when so-called “liberals” actually had something in common with those great champions of freedom the likes of Gladstone and John Stuart Mill, both of whom, incidentally are currently at risk of cancelled.

The UK joined Nato under a Labour prime minister. And, when Left-wing parties were dominated by working people rather than professional activists, they were just as patriotic as their conservative opponents. Sadly, the Left has abandoned the field. Its leaders are either too weak to stand up for our own common values or worse than that, they’ve embraced the doctrine of woke themselves.

It seems that we conservatives must find the strength to defend the principles of free society on our own.

So, our Conservative government in the United Kingdom is legislating to protect free speech on campus. We will stop the sinister phenomenon of academics or students who offend left wing orthodoxies being censored or harassed. As Culture Secretary I challenged those cultural institutions, those institutions funded by ordinary taxpayers but which promoted politicised agendas. We have made it clear to schools that it is illegal to teach the concept of “white privilege” as though it were undisputed fact.

And we must also not be frightened to expose the behaviour of some corporate giants. And you know, all of us know, the sort of corporations that I’m talking about. Ones that denounced perfectly legitimate efforts to reform electoral laws in democracies, whilst at the very same time, keeping a profitable silence whilst flogging their goods to authoritarian regimes.

We Conservatives, instead, are on the side of people who believe that we are a force for good in the world. The US and the UK may certainly be different societies but we are joined by the same fundamental values.

Neither of us can afford the luxury of indulging in this painful woke psychodrama. It will take courage to resist it. Too many people have already fallen for the dismal argument that standing up for freedom is reactionary, or that somehow it is kind or virtuous to submit to these self-righteous dogmas. Well it plainly is not.

Instead as Margaret Thatcher said to you almost 25 years ago the task of conservatives is to remake the case for the West to proclaim our beliefs in the wonderful creativity of the human spirit, in the rights of property and the rule of law, and in the extraordinary fruitfulness of enterprise and trade.  She refused to see the decline of the West as our inevitable destiny. And neither should we.

 

Jake Bequette writes at The Federalist Brian Flores’ Lawsuit Exposes The Absurdity Of NFL Racial Quotas Like The ‘Rooney Rule’ Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

Race obsessed-leftists want it both ways: force the NFL to have fewer white coaches and owners, while still signing NFL players based on their performance.

The efforts of leftists to destroy the world of sports took another Great Leap Forward last week with the news that former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a class-action suit against the NFL and all 32 NFL teams for racial discrimination. Flores was fired in January after three seasons with the Dolphins, and he recently interviewed for the New York Giants head coaching job that instead went to Brian Daboll.

Flores’ lawsuit is an unhinged, 58-page rant that focuses more on topics like professional football history and George Floyd rather than Flores’ specific allegations because his allegations are preposterous. Flores says the NFL “remains rife with racism” when it comes to hiring and retaining black coaches, and that the league “is managed much like a plantation,” yet he has been employed as an NFL coach for the past 14 years, and made upwards of $3 million per season as the Dolphins head coach.

The thrust of Flores’ suit is that since 70 percent of NFL players are black, and anywhere between 3 percent and 34 percent of coaches and executive personnel are black, that is prima facie evidence that the league is “racially segregated.” But Flores himself was an enthusiastic participant in this supposed “injustice,” since nearly 75 percent of his own coaching staff during his tenure with the Dolphins were white. And nowhere in Flores’ lawsuit does it mention that he was fired in Miami by a black general manager, Chris Grier.

Also unmentioned in the lawsuit is precisely how Flores would remedy the situation. If we want an NFL that proportionally “looks like America,” as Joe Biden is so fond of saying, then 3 or 4 of the 32 head coaches, general managers, and team owners would be black, but 75 percent of the players would be white or Hispanic. It’s doubtful that Flores is advocating for two-thirds of black players to be fired and replaced with whites.

Is there any reason, other than “discrimination,” why NFL rosters are still 100 percent male? Why is neither team in the upcoming Super Bowl starting a transgender female at left tackle?

In all my years of playing football, from high school to the NFL, I never heard any teammate of any race complain about a team’s racial composition. Players understand that sports are the ultimate meritocracy, where the currency of the realm is performance, not skin color or political correctness. If a player doesn’t think he’s getting enough playing time, it doesn’t do much good to cry “racism!” The only rational thing to do is to work harder and play better.

Part of the reason this wisdom hasn’t been applied to the coaching world is due to absurd racial quota systems like the “Rooney Rule” in the NFL, which forces teams to interview at least one black candidate for any major coaching or executive vacancy.

The absurdity of this practice can be illustrated by simply applying it to NFL roster vacancies. Imagine if every NFL team were forced to invite a white cornerback into training camp every season. No NFL team has started a white cornerback since Jason Sehorn in 2002. A white cornerback who fulfilled a team’s obligation under a “Sehorn Rule” would feel insecure and teammates would feel resentful, even if the player was qualified for the position and seriously considered for the job.

This is not a defense of the NFL. The league brought this upon themselves when they jumped in bed with the social justice radicals after the Kaepernick saga and doubled down after the George Floyd/BLM riots. They deserve this lawsuit and everything that’s coming to them.

The rest of America would do well to abandon the obsession with racial optics and skin-deep assessments of our fellow countrymen, or we’re heading toward the all-out racial conflict that the radical left seems obsessed with fomenting.

 

 

 

Jordan Peterson writes at National Post Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity is demolishing education and business

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines.” That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.

Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training? Assuming that those biases exist in the manner claimed, and that is a very weak claim, and I’m speaking scientifically here. The Implicit Association test — the much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II. The same social psychologists, broadly speaking, also casually regard conservatism (in the guise of “system justification”) as a form of psychopathology.

Banaji’s continued countenancing of the misuse of her research instrument, combined with the status of her position at Harvard, is a prime reason we still suffer under the DIE yoke, with its baleful effect on what was once the closest we had ever come to truly meritorious selection. A close friend and one of the few colleagues that remain friendly to me (and someone clearly liberal left, by the way) told me flat out that the new crop of his university’s psychology graduate students, selected without the objective Graduate Record Examination (GRE), cannot handle the first-year statistics class. The result: bubbling innuendo that the content is racist.

By the way: everything in the social sciences (and medicine, for that matter) stands or falls with honest and competent statistics.

Furthermore, the accrediting boards for graduate clinical psychology training programs in Canada are now planning to refuse to accredit university clinical programs unless they have a “social justice” orientation. That, combined with some recent legislative changes in Canada, claiming to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” (but really making it exceedingly risky for clinicians to do anything ever but agree always and about everything with their clients) have likely doomed the practice of clinical psychology, which always depended entirely on trust and privacy. Similar moves are afoot in other professional disciplines, such as medicine and law. And if you don’t think that psychologists, lawyers and other professionals are anything but terrified of their now woke governing professional colleges, much to everyone’s extreme detriment, you simply don’t understand how far this has all gone.

Just exactly what am I supposed to do when I meet a graduate student or young professor, hired on DIE grounds? Manifest instant skepticism regarding their professional ability? What a slap in the face to a truly meritorious young outsider. And perhaps that’s the point. The DIE ideology is not friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.

And for those of you who think that I am overstating the case, or that this is something limited in some trivial sense to the universities, consider some other examples: This report from Hollywood, cliched hotbed of “liberal” sentiment, for example, indicates just how far this has gone. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people) embarked on a five-year plan (does that ring any historical bells?) “to diversify our organization and expand our definition of the best,” They did so in an attempt which included developing “new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars,” to, hypothetically, “better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience.” What fruit has this initiative, offspring of the DIE ideology, borne? According to a recent article, penned by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, but posted on former NY Times’ journalist Bari Weiss’s Common Sense website (and Weiss left the Times, because of the intrusion of radical left ideology into that newspaper, just as Tara Henley did recently, vis a vis the CBC): “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers — all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. … How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. … Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?”

And this is everywhere — and if you don’t see it, your head is either in the sand or shoved somewhere far more unmentionable. CBS, for example, has literally mandated that every writers’ room be at least 40 per cent BIPOC in 2021 (50 per cent in 2022).

We are now at the point where race, ethnicity, “gender,” or sexual preference is first, accepted as the fundamental characteristic defining each person (just as the radical leftists were hoping) and second, is now treated as the most important qualification for study, research and employment.

Need I point out that this is insane ? Even the benighted New York Times has its doubts. A headline from August 11, 2021: Are Workplace Diversity Programs Doing More Harm than Good? In a word, yes. How can accusing your employees of racism etc. sufficient to require re-training (particularly in relationship to those who are working in good faith to overcome whatever bias they might still, in these modern, liberal times, manifest) be anything other than insulting, annoying, invasive, high-handed, moralizing, inappropriate, ill-considered, counterproductive, and otherwise unjustifiable?

And if you think DIE is bad, wait until you get a load of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores . Purporting to assess corporate moral responsibility, these scores, which can dramatically affect an enterprise’s financial viability, are nothing less than the equivalent of China’s damnable social credit system, applied to the entrepreneurial and financial world. CEOs: what in the world is wrong with you? Can’t you see that the ideologues who push such appalling nonsense are driven by an agenda that is not only absolutely antithetical to your free-market enterprise, as such, but precisely targeted at the freedoms that made your success possible? Can’t you see that by going along, sheep-like (just as the professors are doing; just as the artists and writers are doing) that you are generating a veritable fifth column within your businesses? Are you really so blind, cowed and cowardly? With all your so-called privilege?

And it’s not just the universities. And the professional colleges. And Hollywood. And the corporate world. Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity — that radical leftist Trinity — is destroying us. Wondering about the divisiveness that is currently besetting us? Look no farther than DIE. Wondering — more specifically — about the attractiveness of Trump? Look no farther than DIE. When does the left go too far? When they worship at the altar of DIE, and insist that the rest of us, who mostly want to be left alone, do so as well. Enough already. Enough. Enough.

Finally, do you know that Vladimir Putin himself is capitalizing on this woke madness? Anna Mahjar-Barducci at MEMRI.org covered his recent speech. I quote from the article’s translation:

“The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags, as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs, and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion, and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones — all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

“This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices — which we, fortunately, have left, I hope — in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past — such as Shakespeare — are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood, memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what color or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

This, from the head of the former totalitarian enterprise, against whom we fought a five decades’ long Cold War, risking the entire planet (in a very real manner). This, from the head of a country riven in a literally genocidal manner by ideas that Putin himself attributes to the progressives in the West, to the generally accepting audience of his once-burned (once (!)) twice-shy listeners.

And all of you going along with the DIE activists, whatever your reasons: this is on you. Professors. Cowering cravenly in pretence and silence. Teaching your students to dissimulate and lie. To get along. As the walls crumble. For shame. CEOs: signalling a virtue you don’t possess and shouldn’t want to please a minority who literally live their lives by displeasure. You’re evil capitalists, after all, and should be proud of it. At the moment, I can’t tell if you’re more reprehensibly timid even than the professors. Why the hell don’t you banish the human resource DIE upstarts back to the more-appropriately-named Personnel departments, stop them from interfering with the psyches of you and your employees, and be done with it? Musicians, artists, writers: stop bending your sacred and meritorious art to the demands of the propagandists before you fatally betray the spirit of your own intuition. Stop censoring your thought. Stop saying you will hire for your orchestral and theatrical productions for any reason other than talent and excellence. That’s all you have. That’s all any of us have.

He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind. And the wind is rising.