For the past decade and a half, employees in American corporations and in the federal government have been compelled to undergo, as a condition of employment, what can only be described as Maoist struggle sessions. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the government-sponsored societal upheaval that resulted in a minimum, I say again, a minimum of a half-million dead during the decade following 1966, the primary object was to root out “enemies of the state”:

Mao unleashed university and high school students to weed out enemies and hold them to account. The students became the paramilitary Red Guards. They were instructed by the party to “clear away the evil habits of the old society” and extinguish what came to be known as “the four olds”—old ideas and customs, old habits and culture. “Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons,” the state newspaper instructed them.

In the struggle sessions the accused, often teachers suspected of lacking proletarian feeling, were paraded through streets and campuses, sometimes stadiums. It was important always to have a jeering crowd; it was important that the electric feeling that comes with the possibility of murder be present. Dunce caps, sometimes wastebaskets, were placed on the victims’ heads, and placards stipulating their crimes hung from their necks. The victims were accused, berated, assaulted. Many falsely confessed in the vain hope of mercy.

Were any “guilty”? It hardly mattered. Fear and terror were the point. A destroyed society is more easily dominated.

The Chinese Catholic Margaret Chu, a medical-lab assistant, was dragged into the office of her labor camp in 1968 and made to answer invented charges. “Their real motive was once and again to force me to admit all my alleged crimes,” she wrote decades later. “ ‘I did not commit any crimes,’ I asserted.” She was accused again, roughed up. She denied her guilt again. “Immediately two people jumped on me and cut off half my hair.”

She was tortured, left in handcuffs for 100 days, and imprisoned for years. While being tortured she sometimes prayed for death so her suffering would stop.

This video, cued up for your convenience, shows the direct parallels between Mao’s China and what is happening on college campuses (and in corporations and government):

In the corporate environment and in government, struggle sessions are known as “diversity training.” They are nothing more than Orwellian “Two Minute Hate” sessions, expanded to well beyond an hour for employees, and for lucky executives they might be expanded into one- or two-day “off-site” gatherings. In the sessions, suspect employees are forced to engage in public self-humiliation and denounce themselves as racists and insufficiently supportive of “POC” and Alphabet People.

Inside the government, particularly in enforcement agencies, the workshops are endemic:

SCOOP: The @FBI is now holding weekly "intersectionality" workshops.

Let me say it plainly: critical race theory is a toxic, pseudoscientific, and racist ideology that is taking over our public institutions—and will be weaponized against the American people.

Time to fight back. pic.twitter.com/N40HJAdTmT

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 28, 2020

Homeland Security

Treasury Department

National Laboratories have also been targeted, perhaps on the theory that scientists will basically believe anything so long as the person spouting the nonsense has the right credentials and social standing:

The federal government's premier nuclear research lab hosted a 3-day reeducation camp for "white males," with the goal of exposing their "white privilege" and deconstructing "white male culture."

Here are the leaked documents from the race-segregated, taxpayer-funded session.👇

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 12, 2020

The virus of critical race theory is spreading to all of the national laboratories.

In new documents from Argonne National Lab—which handles national security and supercomputing for the federal government—a whistleblower describes a relentless campaign of racial harassment.

🧵

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 20, 2020

To call this whole line of training anything but brainwashing and pernicious trash designed to heighten racial tensions and divisiveness requiring still more diversity workshops would be an understatement. A recent infographic published by the Smithsonian essentially labeled the character and social traits that built Western Civilization (and successful civilizations everywhere) as “white culture” and, implicitly, deserving of banning:

One of the things that the BLM movement (and no, there is really no difference between the “movement” and the Marxist, anti-family, anti-Christian organization) has drawn a spotlight on is critical race theory, and on Friday, President Trump barred federal agencies from using critical race theory as any part of their “diversity” training grift (READ Trump Orders Purge of ‘Critical Race Theory’ From Federal Agencies: What It Is & Why Trump’s Order Matters).

The howling that resulted from shutting off the flow of federal money to race-hustlers and grifters shows the level of the problem. This is how the New York Times covered the story:

More Than Ever, Trump Casts Himself as the Defender of White America

.

After a summer when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting racial injustice against Black Americans, President Trump has made it clear over the last few days that, in his view, the country’s real race problem is bias against white Americans.

Just days after returning from Kenosha, Wis., where he staunchly backed law enforcement and did not mention the name of Jacob Blake, the Black man shot seven times in the back by the police, Mr. Trump issued an order on Friday to purge the federal government of racial sensitivity training that his White House called “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”

The president then spent much of the weekend tweeting about his action, presenting himself as a warrior against identity politics. “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue,” he wrote of such programs. “Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!” He reposted a tweet from a conservative outlet hailing his order: “Sorry liberals! How to be Anti-White 101 is permanently cancelled!”

What President Trump is doing is standing up for the right of every American to be treated with dignity and fairness regardless of skin color. If one dismisses, as I do, the Marxist intersectionalist assertion that only white people can be racist, then critical race theory is about nothing but institutionalizing racial preferences and establishing sexual perversions as superior to normal sexual relationships.

“To say antiracism is anti-American is to say racism is American, which is to say Trump wants white Americans to be racist,” said Ibram X. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an Anti-Racist” and director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. “And that’s precisely the point. He’s relying on manipulating the racist fears of white voters to win them over. Once white people lose those fears through interventions like trainings, Trump loses their votes.”

I’m not really sure who Mr. Kendi is when he’s up and has his trousers on, but here he is just engaging in bullsh** straight out of Alice in Wonderland:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ”Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Kendi and his fellow grifters have defined racism as being anything they wish, therefore anti-racism is anything they don’t like. The idea that people may be told that they have value as human beings, as Children of God, beyond whatever their skin color, to him is racist.

[Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative scholar at the Discovery Institute], though, said on Sunday that Mr. Trump was pitting his America First narrative celebrating the nation’s heritage against what he called the Black Lives Matter narrative that America was founded on racism. “The president is framing the election for voters in these terms,” he said. “Do they want to preserve the American way of life or do they want to burn it down?”

This is exactly right. I think President Trump rightly thinks there are many, many more Americans who believe that America, on balance, is a wonderful country and they are truly pissed off at BLM and its Antifa stormtroopers trying to stoke a race/class civil war. Most Americans don’t believe you are inherently anything based on your race and reject the idea out of hand. There is literally no downside to President Trump doing this. No one who believes in this claptrap is going to vote for Trump in the first place, but a lot of people who have experienced this ritualized bigotry will.