Tag Archives: discrimination

Current Events

Critical Race Theory

4 Comments

A very well written piece, albeit there are some words the left may need a dictionary to understand what he saying. LOL. A mostly retired trial lawyer who began as a Marine JAG Officer 1975-1982.

He poses a great question we all should be asking today, and does a great job answering it. Worth the read! Thank you Michael for sending it to me.

“What is wrong with critical race theory?”

Once the exclusive domain of deep thinking university professors, critical race theory became a part of our national conversation when the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to stop conducting workplace training based on critical race theory and opened an inquiry into the City of Seattle’s use of it.  The training is in fact political indoctrination and the public ought to know what it is and why it should be resisted.

Critical theory sprung largely from the Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt School in 1930’s Germany.  In 1848 Karl Marx had introduced the world to an analysis of social relations characterized by oppression when he argued in The Communist Manifesto and Capital that working class laborers were oppressed by those in power, the owners of capital. He argued for class consciousness, and in advocating radical change, he famously argued the workers had nothing to lose but their chains.  The dilemma facing the Frankfurt School scholars was why after the Russian Revolution and the wide dissemination of Marx’s invitation to a workers’ paradise was it not being realized?  Industrial organization and mass communications seemed to divert the oppressed workers from their liberation.  Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School is credited with arguing a theory is “critical” if it seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”, and critical theory was applied to interrogate how power was used to perpetuate oppression.

Critical race theory is a variant of what began in the 1970’s as critical legal studies.  Critical legal studies looked at our laws with the assumption that law oppresses people, especially minorities, and examined how power was used to create and enforce the law.  Restrictive racial covenants in property deeds was an example of the use of law to perpetuate racial oppression.  Denying women the right to vote and prosecuting women like Susan B. Anthony in 1872 when she defied the law and cast a vote was an example of the use of law to perpetuate gender oppression.

Women gained the right to vote in Washington in 1910, Wyoming before that, and the US Supreme Court declared restrictive racial covenants were illegal and unenforceable everywhere in 1948.  Nonetheless, and not withstanding adoption of the 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments and a web of state and federal legislation outlawing discrimination based solely on race or gender, critical legal theorists concluded that the power of the oppressors was  embedded in our political structures and infects our laws today to perpetuate bias and discrimination against minorities and other marginalized communities.  As Samuel Gregg puts it in “Liberalism’s Civilization Problem,” Law and Liberty, September 7, 2020, the left’s “insistence that most of the West’s achievements are primarily masks for endless oppression largely flows from the left’s generally negative view of Western civilization” (emphasis mine).  In this dystopia there is no arc of justice, instead, US history is irredeemably rotten to the core.

Critical race theory proceeds from the fallacy that a binary of white and black, or white and everybody else, is the only appropriate frame of reference for a discussion of race.  Applying Ockham’s Razor to inconvenient facts, this binary ignores the history of racial bias against the Irish, Italian, Jewish people and many others ordinarily thought of as white.  Starting with this assumed racial binary, the critical theorists contend racial bias is embedded not only in our laws, but also our language, media, political structures and culture, and they set out to look for it.  Ignoring all the steps we have taken to eliminate racial prejudice from our laws and institutions, practitioners of critical race theory rediscovered what Stokely Carmichael described as “institutional racism” in his 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation.

It’s called systemic racism today, and its corollary theory holds that implicit bias exists even among those who deny any bias at all.  Indeed, denial of bias is strong proof one is in fact sick with bias.  This demand to override a person’s reluctance to accept the fact that she is in fact racially biased is one of the most pernicious and dangerous features of critical race theory.  These are not mere thought crimes, they are unthought crimes.  And the unrepentant ominously resemble dissidents in the former Soviet Union or the unruly psychiatric patients in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The Trump administration’s recent Executive Order and inquiry into Seattle’s work place training alleges that only White employees are required to admit to and denounce their racist impulses.  At first blush the required training appears to violate state and federal laws prohibiting discrimination based solely on race.

Aside from the totalitarian impulse to control what people think and the words people speak, two fundamental issues should make us wary of the growth of this ideology.  First, it is no accident these theorists too often are White academics and legislators.  Robin Diangelo is a White academic whose popular 2018 book, “White Fragility,” is a lecture to White people about how they got race all wrong and ignorantly so.

White men legislated poverty programs in the 1960’s that in the end further impoverished Black communities.  So much so that White men led by President Bill Clinton and then Senator Joe Biden legislated welfare and criminal justice reform that was directed against the Black community.  The reform ended “welfare as we know it” as Clinton put it and incarcerated large numbers of Black men, “super-predators” who needed to be brought to heel as Ms. Clinton put it to an all White audience in New Hampshire.  White folks telling Black folks what they need is a not so subtle form of oppression. White folks telling White folks what they shouldn’t think or say is almost as bad.  Isn’t it time for White folk to stop telling Black folk what they need?

Second, the critical race ideology claims all White people are infected with the racism disease and need help regardless of who they are or where they grew up.  In Diangelos’ world there are no individuals, no person is unique; instead, as a “race” we produce and reproduce racism in lockstep in every aspect of our daily lives whether we know it or not.  All notions of freedom are illusory.  The chains that bind us are no longer mere economic shackles, they define our very being which is, not coincidentally, not capable of redemption.

It is by definition a racist ideology, it divides our communities, and gives cover to those who want to destroy our history and institutions.  No leap of imagination is required to draw a direct line from the claim that systemic racism infects our institutions and must be pulled out by its roots to the destruction of civic monuments, attacks on the police, looting of stores and burning buildings in our cities today.

As Galatians 6:7 taught us, “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Michael J. Bond
Copyright 2020

Postscript: I’ll be off the net for a week, going fishing. Need a break. Meanwhile,let’s all pray for President Trump and his bride!!!

Originally posted 2020-10-03 15:51:40.

Current Events

Woke Coke Redux

3 Comments

Gang, I know it’s Sunday and a time for respite, but this came across the wire today and I just have to share it now. It appears Woke Coke hasn’t learned despite their drop in sales, Now they have come out with something utterly ridiculous by demanding the law firms, etc. who represent them to diversify. LOL. And now the shareholders, who by the way OWN the company and for whom the board of directors are supposed to  be working are speaking out. I love it. See the power consumers and shareholders wield over corporations. Pass the word, let’s destroy this woke company!

 

Coca-Cola Shareholders Send Letter Attacking Company’s Woke Policy For Contracted Lawyers, Saying It Requires Them To Violate Anti-Discrimination Law

Signage is displayed on a Coca-Cola Co. delivery truck in Frankfort, Kentucky, U.S., on Monday, Feb. 10, 2020.
Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A group of “concerned” Coca-Cola shareholders have sent a letter to the beverage corporation, alleging a recent policy aimed at diversity would actually require law firms that represent the company to violate anti-discrimination law.

Paul Mirengoff, a board member of the American Civil Rights Project (ACRP), reported at Powerline that in January 2021, “the general counsel of Coca-Cola sent a letter to the law firms that represent it. The letter demanded, among other things, that these firms ‘commit that at least 30% of each of billed associate and partner time will be from diverse attorneys, and of such amounts at least half will be from Black attorneys.’”

ACRP responded to the policy with an open letter demanding that Coca-Cola either “publicly retract the discriminatory outside-counsel policies it announced in January” or “provide access to the corporate records related to the decision of Coca-Cola’s officers and directors to adopt and retain those illegal policies,” Mirengoff wrote.

The letter notes that Coca-Cola’s policy “of contracting, refusing to contract, and altering the terms of signed contracts on the basis of the race of Coke’s counterparties, the [directors] have exposed Coke and its shareholders to material risk of liability” for potentially violating anti-discrimination laws.

The letter continues:

The Policies additionally expose the company to potential litigation on other theories, including (without waiving the right to later note more):

(a)the Policies order outside counsel to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and disability status in hiring, promotional decisions, firing, staffing, and internal compensation structures. In doing so, the Policies order outside counsel to violate Title VII of Civil Rights Act of 1964,Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

(b)in requiring the disclosure of individual outside-counsel “team member[’]s” disability status, the Policies separately compel the violation of the confidentiality provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

As Mirengoff noted, the letter adds that Coca-Cola knew or should have known the policy it enacted was illegal. In April, famed attorney Boyden Gray wrote an open letter to the company outlining how the new policy was discriminatory, so by now the company should have no questions as to whether the policy is potentially illegal.

Yet, as Daniel Morenoff, leader of the ACRP wrote in the letter to Coca-Cola, on the same day Gray wrote his letter, the company:

[Coke] executed and filed with the SEC a Form 10Q omitting any reference whatsoever to the [illegal contracting] policies or Coke’s related liabilities. Given the total omission of these material liabilities, that document, by all appearances, did not “contain[ ]” or “fairly present[ ], in all material respects, the financial condition…. of the Company.” Thus, [Coke] executed and submitted to the SEC a false “Certification Pursuant to 18 USC Section 1350, as Adopted Pursuant to Section 906 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Even though Coca-Cola didn’t report this new policy, Morenoff wrote, it has retained the policy. Concluding his letter, Morenoff issued a demand to the company:

The Stockholders therefore demand that you immediately publicly retract the Policies in their entirety. If we do not receive a response to these demands within 30 business days, we will understand. . .Coke. . .to have refused to address these matters themselves. At that point, the Stockholders will be forced to seek judicial relief to protect Coke and the Stockholders’ interests in the company from your continued breaches of your fiduciary duties.

I hope that after you have reviewed this letter, you will be in touch to inform us of how Coke will comply with these demands.

The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.

Postscript. PLEASE share this with as many friends as you can, we can destroy this company and send the word to other corporations to mind their own business of running the company for its shareholders and stay out of politics.

Current Events, Recent Posts

Leftism in Today’s USMC

14 Comments

Received this in an email from a highly respected retired Marine Colonel friend of mine. They are his words, not mine, but I wholeheartedly agree with his assessment.

“I wonder how much longer this Marine will be tolerated by the present “leadership.” When they see he is an attorney maybe they will be careful as to how to shut him up. What’s going on is very difficult to believe.”

From an opinion piece in Newsweek, Saturday 20 March 2021

In the Marine Corps, we don’t have quotas, but we do have goals. And Marines accomplish goals,” my officer-in-charge told me and a few other brand-new second lieutenants, each of us assigned to temporary recruiting duty while awaiting orders to Quantico. The captain then told us we had to sign up a certain number of college-enrolled racial minorities and females. No need to be too strict on physical fitness or academics, he said. Just bring them in.

That was in 2009. Discrimination of this sort has been an ingrained yet lamentable part of the military’s recruitment, retention and promotion practices for many years. But my fellow officers and I couldn’t have imagined that, 12 years later, our disagreement with these policies would get us labeled “racist,” “sexist,” “bigoted” or “extremists” worthy of “eradication” and “elimination” from the USMC. Yet the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps said as much in his February 22 “core values” memo.

I’m now a major in the Marine Corps Reserve and a member of a formerly all-male infantry battalion.* This past weekend we had our monthly drill period. A few days before drill, the command told us that all scheduled training on Sunday morning was canceled and replaced with a “stand-down to address extremism in the ranks.”

It was left-wing political programming, as direct as it sounds.

We were instructed that there is a Taliban-like threat in the United States called “domestic terrorism.” These terrorists are characterized in part by “anti-government,” “anti-authority” or “abortion-related” extremism and various “supremacist” ideas. None of these terms are defined. The Marine Corps entrusts the government’s HR department to figure that out.

Reporting requirements are key. Do you suspect someone supports an “extremist ideology?” Alert the chain of command. Have you heard a Marine express “contempt toward officials?” Notify the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Don’t handle anything on your own. Just rat them out. After all, “service is a privilege” and it’d be a shame to lose that privilege for failing to do your part to stamp out “extremists.” One PowerPoint slide posed this imperative in stark terms: “Do you want to be a Marine or do you want to be part of an organization that sows disunity and hate. You cannot have divided loyalties.”

Where did all this come from? Soft liberalism has taken root in the military over several decades. These alarming trends are already well documented in James Hasson’s book Stand Down: How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military. But in the wake of President Joe Biden’s election—and more precipitously since the January 6 “insurrection”—bureaucratic progressivism has hardened into iron-fisted wokeism.

January 6 provided the pretext that the government, media and Democratic Party needed to drum up paranoia about white-nationalist domestic terrorism. A month later, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a memo to all Pentagon leadership laying the groundwork for my unit’s Sunday morning indoctrination.

In his memo, Austin announced that the Department of Defense “will not tolerate…actions associated with extremist or dissident ideologies” and ordered all 1.4 million personnel to receive “extremism” training. And he promised it was just the beginning: the “stand-down is just the first initiative of what I believe must be a concerted effort to…eliminate the corrosive effects that extremist ideology and conduct have on the workforce.”

Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Harker followed with his own memo. He announced the objective for the entire Navy Department: nothing short of “eradicating extremism.” How? By rooting out “actions that betray our oaths” like promoting “ideology” or “doctrine” that challenges the “gender identity and sexual orientation” agenda or advancing efforts that allegedly “deprive individuals of their civil rights.”

In other words, advocating for the Biblical view of sex and marriage in law and policy is, according to today’s armed forces, tantamount to oath betrayal.

Then came the Marine Corps’ turn to mouth the right things about “extremism.” In late February, the highest-ranking enlisted Marine issued a memo to all hands condemning our institutional failure to “completely eliminate,” “eradicate,” and “conquer” all “racists, bigots, homophobes, and bullies.” Those people “are not welcome” in the military. “It is impossible,” the memo says, “to be both a good Marine and be any one of those things at the same time.” Again, specifics of “those things” are undefined. The author of the memo and the four-star Commandant leave that to the military’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force.

Finally, on March 5, the Marine Corps released an official directive: no later than April 2, all “commanders and supervisors at all levels will conduct and document a leadership stand-down in order to address issues of extremism in the ranks.” The commandant included a video with the directive, saying, “We must continuously strive to eliminate any division in our ranks.”

We all know what that means: any dissension on any issue that Biden-appointed top brass says is racist, sexist or homophobic will not be tolerated.

There is no doubt as to where all this is headed. The Pentagon’s swift and coordinated “smiting” of Tucker Carlson, who had the gall to “diss” the idea of sending pregnant women to war—an obviously absurd idea to all but the most politically correct officers grasping for a promotion—makes it very clear.

How did we get here? The truth is that today’s military is running on the fumes of our vastly superior forefathers and the ever-shrinking proportion of each branch that still does truly heroic work and accomplishes truly extraordinary feats. The rest is a bloated military-industrial complex given over to Fortune 500-style corporate progressivism.

And if it’s bad in the Marine Corps, imagine how much worse it is in the other services.

America’s enemies are laughing at us. Frankly, we deserve it. But it doesn’t need to be this way. To get back on top, our military must reject “extremism” training, reverse all the progressive policies enacted over the past several years, return to a true meritocracy and focus exclusively on the only thing that matters: winning wars.

We need a military fit for real warriors—not the social justice kind.

Aaron Reitz is a Major in the USMC Reserve, an Afghanistan War veteran and the Texas Deputy Attorney General for Legal Strategy.

* I prepared this article off-duty and in my personal capacity. The views I express here are solely mine and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy or the Office of the Attorney General of Texas.

For the life of me I cannot understand how a dedicated hard charging Marine, Enlisted or Officer could stay in a Marine Corps such as this?

I agree with my friend’s comments in that I also wonder how the leftist leaders in our once great Corps will handle this Major. Bravo Zulu for him speaking out. Get em’ Major.