Are all ideas worthy of space to make an argument in the public square? I grew up believing the answer to be yes, thinking that information should be liberated and free citizens responsible enough to decide which philosophies are worthy of adoption versus dismissal. Call it naivety or a libertarian streak. Whatever the reasoning, I was wrong.
Last month, on U.S. soil, another murderous attack against a young Israeli couple ended the lives of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in Washington, D.C. The same crowd that repeated the fictional "Hands up, don’t shoot!" mantra for years as American cities burned is silent in the face of this barbarity. Perhaps the progressive movement learned that it’s not a good look to openly celebrate the killing of Jews, as the Black Lives Matter movement did in response to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
Though the left is largely silent over the antisemitic murder in Washington, D.C., they offered ample scathing commentary when the State Department granted asylum to 59 white Afrikaners from South Africa. According to the philosophies of today’s left-wing, having a lighter skin tone and arriving with American flags in hand should disqualify someone from being offered a chance to make a new life in the U.S. But why? Those of us who hold to a realistic, historical, moral, and Constitutional view of the world have observed and noted this double standard in political debate for years. Where we often miss the mark is in understanding the deeper philosophy of the Marx-inspired worldview and arming ourselves to combat poisonous ideologies at a level that transcends staged spats on cable news networks. We must do better.
In order to do that, we must look back to the days of Karl Marx, author of the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. Having studied under German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Marx developed a thought doctrine that reduces every human being to nothing more than a unit of economic production, and assigns either oppressor or oppressed status to each individual. Gone is the Imago Dei. Marx reduced humans to nothing more than fleshly machines in a perpetual competition of abuse.
Taken further, this worldview perpetuates a humanistic eschatology through which ultimate flourishing comes only through political revolution that kills off the oppressors, so that the oppressed may flourish. The world witnessed similar ideas tested to bloody consequence a century before during the French Revolution.
Marx’s perspective was resoundingly rejected during his lifetime. But then came the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which murdered the Russian royal family and installed Vladimir Lenin as supreme ruler. Having come to power through those whom Lenin referred to as "useful idiots," who could be swayed to join the revolutionary cause, Lenin began an initiative to push Marx’s writings into the culture and make the previously dead philosophies a staple of Soviet education. Every single 20th-century dictator used the same model, giving us communist rule spread across much of the globe to the present day.
After WWII, the Nazis were forced from European government. Their ideas found safe harbor in the university. Thus, Germany continued plaguing the world, this time through the Frankfurt School, which continues to promulgate the belief that human beings are either oppressors or oppressed, and that salvation comes through violent revolution. From this descended doctrines including Critical Race Theory—which confers oppressor / oppressed status solely based on skin tone—and Queer Theory, which rejects reality in total. "Dismantle and Deconstruct" are the creeds of those who hold to these dark doctrines that seek only malevolent aims. The philosophies they embrace aim not for reasonable debate, but for the overthrow of ordered liberty. This is the biggest threat facing the West since the Second World War and must be treated as such.
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This takes us to the recent action taken to remove books from military libraries and coursework from military academies that promote the view that America is inherently, irredeemably racist and that the white male is by nature an unredeemable oppressor. This is a no-brainer. You cannot simultaneously preserve a mindset of willingness to die in defense of America while training military leaders to hate the nation. You will either have love of country or contempt of it. Those who embrace the latter cannot be trusted to take up the arms of state.
The same is true of why such works should not be used to recruit school children and university students. A citizenry trained to hate their nation will act accordingly, as was the center of gravity in every communist revolution of the 20th Century. It’s one thing to read Marx, Hegel, and the like as part of understanding viewpoint conflict. It’s another to embrace and promote their arguments.
The fruit of the critical theories isn’t debate. It’s blood-soaked. Imagine a world in which America’s nuclear-armed military force believes good and evil are based on the level of melanin in your skin. That very way of thinking has been pushed into military training for years. In contrast, there is virtually no training for military members to understand anything about the U.S. Constitution they swear to. Ideology demands totality, and we have seen many disturbing indicators of military members in recent years openly aligning against American principles. It will take concerted effort to radiate that cancer out.
The ancient war philosopher Sun Tzu’s view of war was one in which an army would need to exert minimal force to succeed, because the enemy had been weakened from within ahead of time by secret agents that worked to “spread false rumours and misleading information, to corrupt and subvert officials, to create and exacerbate internal discord.” That is what we face today in the ideological war raging across the nation. More recent authors of fictional works warn of darkness that should not be trifled with. In the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling offered a stark contrast between dark magic that should be shunned, versus magic used for benevolent purpose. Similarly, consider the dreaded Book of the Dead represented in the 1999 film "The Mummy." Once its words were spoken, evil was released—the kind that threatened on a global scale. Artists warn through allegory of what history tells in tombstones.
It has always been understood that there is evil in this world, and that sane societies shun it. That is the foundational purpose of government, as noted in scripture: to reward virtue and punish vice.
All Americans have a responsibility to go deeper than the snippet arguments we see on the topic of wokeness and understand the thick intellectual warfare at work against our nation. The time for debating is past. Now is the time to understand the threat being conveyed through the full spectrum of cultural influence and fight it like the existential threat to the nation it truly is. Sane people don’t allow their children to include poison as part of a balanced diet. Neither should we any longer give safe harbor to ideologies that aim to overthrow the Constitutional order here, as they have done many times over across far too many nations in the recent past. It’s time to learn what we’re up against, to close the book of the dead, and this time to burn the thing.
