I just finished reading a new book by Newsmax anchor Bianca de la Garza that does an excellent job of explaining how the woke mob managed to brainwash at least a few generations of Americans.
Her book describes how caustic policies such as DEI (Diversity, equity, inclusion), Critical Race Theory, and the cult of transgenderism have corrupted American society and warped our schools and universities.
The book is called “Incoming—On the Front Lines of the Left’s War on Truth.” I highly recommend it.
As someone who spent 27 years in the world of professional journalism and another 13 years teaching it at a major university, I can identify with and confirm the arguments Garza makes in her book.
Journalism in 2024 is nothing like the journalism that existed when I joined the Chicago Tribune in 1970 as a green college graduate.
The Tribune’s newsroom was replete with experienced reporters from whom a newbie like me learned the intricate journalistic ropes. Editors made sure my copy wasn’t filled with my opinions and biases. I learned how to report impartially and to write fast and clearly. And I understood that what I was doing was important to maintaining the vitality of our democratic republic.
Journalism today is not about gathering facts and presenting them impartially to an audience of readers and viewers. It is about propaganda and spreading a leftist narrative that borders on Marxism. A disturbing majority of the mainstream media has become a bullhorn for the Democratic Party.
That’s not surprising when recent studies reveal that some 90 percent of all journalists in America are Democrats or leftist independents. Their job is not to report the news with fairness and balance but to pepper their stories with Democrat Party talking points and leftist narratives.
This transformation didn’t happen overnight. It took root in our schools and especially our universities.
I saw it firsthand as a tenured full professor, Department Head, and Dean at the University of Illinois—one of America’s top ten research universities. Don’t get me wrong, the University of Illinois is an illustrious institution with world-class facilities and scholars.
But as with most of America’s colleges and universities, it is populated with a surfeit of liberal, leftwing, and even Marxist professors and administrators who are not shy about inflicting their political ideas on their pliable students.
As Garza points out in her book: “Leftist professors were granted tenure, and they began indoctrinating a new generation of kids. It’s no accident that this mainstreaming of Marxism coincides perfectly with the sudden rise of political correctness in the early 1990s.
“In the 1960s, a West German student activist named Rudi Dutschke said leftists needed to get jobs at universities, in government, and journalism, taking over these places from the inside and using their new perches to spread their Marxist ideas.”
Dutschke called this the “long march through institutions,” a name that echoed the “long march” that Mao Zedong’s communist army took during the Chinese Civil War in the 1930s.
Garza writes that many leaders of the neo-Marxism movement in America went underground, adopting the tactics of Dutschke. Rather than attacking the institutions of America with bombs and battering rams as they’d tried to do for years, they would join these institutions to shape them from the inside, playing the long game, in other words.
“By the late 1980s, when totalitarian Marxist governments everywhere began crumbling, these professors remained safe in their faculty lounges, ruminating on different ways to spread their ideology peacefully while sipping on lattes from the school cafeteria and making big capitalist-sized salaries while they did it,” Garza writes.
“For a while, this nonsense only existed on the campuses of universities. Professors would write articles, and students would have to regurgitate those articles in their papers to get good grades,” she continues. “As more and more leftwing nutjobs joined university faculties, these bad ideas began to stick. According to a survey in 2006, more than 20 percent of American professors openly identified as Marxists.
The number is more like 35 percent today.
Then, along came Millennials (born from 1981 to 1996) and Gen Z-ers (born 1997 to 2012), many of whom were reared by helicopter parents to believe that the world was a dangerous, unfair place—and that they were special cherubs who should never face any adversity for any reason. Garza continues that they met a set of left-wing theories that perfectly mapped onto their view of the world.
“They were perfectly happy to believe that the United States was an evil, racist place that wanted to oppress sexual minorities and people of color. They were happy to call everyone they didn’t like racist and to form mobs on the quads of their colleges to shout down speakers whose ideas made them uncomfortable.”
With our universities occupied and administered by neo-Marxists and an ever-growing population of irrational leftists, is it any wonder that so many people today are rejecting settled science and common sense when it comes to issues of gender and sexual identity?
When a Supreme Court justice refuses to define what a woman is during her confirmation hearing, that should be the definitive warning that our nation is tilting toward collective absurdity.
When men identifying as women are allowed to compete against women in sports, use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms, and shower with women—all with official and legal support from our federal, state, and local governments, is it any wonder that our nation resembles the parable of The Emperor’s New Clothes?”
The woke left has managed to turn our world upside down to the point where we are told to believe that mathematics is racist, biology is disinformation, and history is something to be manipulated to suit the warped worldview of today’s woke mob.
Garza says she would like to see a return to logical, conservative values, not just fiscal conservatism, but conservative with how you make decisions, not allowing schools to make decisions and hide your kids if they want to change their genders with boys identifying as girls, etc. These aren’t normal values. These are not traditions from our nation. People want to get back to sanity and safety. And that’s what the choice really was with the 2024 election. People see it now clearer than they ever have before.
However, as Garza writes: “Today, the woke agenda is so enmeshed in our daily life that we hardly recognize it anymore. The long game—or, as the Marxists put it, the long march—is complete.”
I am not ready to surrender to the political and social charlatans and frauds, however. We have four years ahead when we can right our sinking ship and set sail again to the land of common sense and rational thought.
–30—
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