Hate
A meditation, continued
My last post discussed the rampant hatred that plagues the body politic in the United States today, and for the last decade.
Why so much hatred, and why now?
We are looking at a division in this country not based on slavery, as in the 1850s, or the Vietnam War, as in the 1960s.
Today’s hatred is driven by a belief by nearly one half of the nation that the other half is not just wrong, stupid, and pigheaded, but actually evil.
I came across a book recently that sported the extremely interesting title, “Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave.” This book, written more than 30 years ago by David Breese, attributed immense power over then-current national affairs to Charles Darwin, John Dewey, Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes, Soren Kierkegaard, Julius Wellhausen, and Karl Marx.
Of those 7, one reigns supreme today: Karl Marx.
In what is referred to these days as “The Long March Through the Institutions,” devotees of Marx, willingly or unwittingly, have been credited with first infiltrating, then dominating, such critical areas of society as colleges and universities, mass media, arts and entertainment, the public schools, and finally, corporate boardrooms.
The architects of this march began it nearly a century ago, after being rescued from Hitler’s Germany—actual Fascists—and setting up shop in major American universities, most notably, today’s reigning hotbed of Anti-Semitism, Columbia University. Marxist academics have been with us for more than a century—Charles Beard wrote a Marxist critique of the United States Constitution in 1913 that has been required reading for History majors more or less ever since—but this cluster, known collectively as the “Frankfurt School,” is credited with determining that the traditional Marxist structure of creating a theoretically perfect society by pitting class against class on the road to the worker’s paradise would not work in the United States. Instead, they identified race as the best way to pit groups against each other. Their creation, “Critical theory,” which morphed later into today’s “Critical race theory,” posited a world composed of the oppressed and their oppressors, which transformed the Marxist framework based earlier on those who owned the means of production and those who did not, to focus on American inequalities based solely on race, not economics.
If you want to see how this plays out in Marx world, take a look at the “oppression matrix,” “intersectionality,” and “the other.” These people have created a parallel universe and many of them live in it. I will post a discussion later on “Thinking Like a Marxist” to examine some of this.
Today’s applied Marxism mandates that skin color determines who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. For instance, if you are a first-generation immigrant from India who owns four hotels and five convenience stores, you are oppressed because you are not white. For bonus points, India was once a colony of Great Britain, so you were doubly oppressed—despite the fact that you have a million dollars in the bank. According to Marxist received wisdom, you can be a former President of the United States and still be classified as oppressed if you have any oppressed blood coursing through your veins. I am not sure where they come down on whether non-white Republican Secretaries of State are oppressed or not. But wait—Marxists have an answer for that. It’s called “false consciousness.” Take that one for a spin if you dare.
All Israelis, regardless of their station in life, are considered to be oppressors because they live on ground that once belonged to Palestinians—after it was taken from the Jews. This particular strain of anti-semitism is particularly strong these days. Several recent polls show that a majority of Gen Z Americans hold anti-semitic views; the most recent one I saw demonstrated that more than 50% of this cohort believe that Jews over-emphasize The Holocaust for their own gain.
Let that sink in for a minute. The single greatest instance of state-sponsored mass murder of a particular group in world history that ended in 1945 should be off limits for purposes of discussion to the people whose ancestors suffered through it. That means that being targeted by a government for extermination based on your ethnicity does not equal being oppressed.
Compare that with the reporting—or lack thereof—of the systematic slaughter of Christians in Nigeria by Islamic ‘fundamentalists.’ Christians by definition are oppressors—remember that “opiate of the masses” passage from Marx—even while they are being murdered by the thousands. Their murderers, who have been at this for decades, are not oppressors, because they are living and murdering in a former British colony.
The same goes for the Hamas savages who raped, tortured, and murdered some 1200 innocent Jewish men, women and children on October 7, 2023. If you want a stomach-turning example of revisionist history worthy of any good Marxist, read the anodyne entry of “October 7 attacks” in Wikipedia. Those folks could teach the Tom Sawyer Days Fence Painting contestants a thing or two about whitewash.
Why so much hatred today?
Credit “The Academy,” the practitioners of higher education who have systematically thrown out or refused to admit conservative faculty members to their ranks for decades. There are plenty of books available about “Tenured Radicals” over the last 40 years. If you read closely enough, you might find the names of your professors.
How did Marxist thought trickle down to your local school district? Rest assured, it has.
Who teaches the teachers? Tenured radicals?
Who chooses and assigns the textbooks for K-12 classrooms in your school district? Those who were taught by tenured radicals? Who writes those textbooks in the first place? Tenured radicals?
How many million American students were assigned books written by Howard Zinn?
Zinn described himself as “something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist.” Sound familiar, Zohran Mamdani fans?
Zinn’s goal, in his own words, for “A People’s History of the United States,” which has been standard reading in classrooms all across America for the last 45 years, was “quiet revolution…in the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives.” Sound familiar? If you have read “The Communist Manifesto,” you will note an eerie resemblance.
Simply put, according to Zinn and his fellow travelers in the Critical Theory camps, the United States is a government based on the evils of slavery and capitalism, not the first and only nation in the history of the world founded on the concept of personal liberty that people to this day are literally willing to break the law to enter and keep on breaking the law in order to stay. These ‘revisionist’ historians will not walk you through the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson sought to condemn slavery (one of several attempts to do so in his political life), but could not get it passed due to the intransigence of delegates from what is today known as “The Deep South,” where slavery had taken root. That would be a mortal sin: telling the other side of the story cannot be allowed because they and only they know “their” truths.
Their hatred for America is palpable, surpassed only by their love of being able to express their hatred of America without fear of recrimination in the land of the free. And getting paid well for the privilege due to their exalted status as tenured untouchables.
As for tenure itself—name any other “job” in America where you cannot be fired, have your insurance and pensions paid for, funding made available for “professional development/conferences” attended by those similarly situated so you can preach to the choir in faraway places, obtain course releases for committee work to lighten your teaching “load,” leave the real teaching/student advising to teaching assistants paid little better than slave wages, and have the occasional three months off/year-long sabbatical to pursue your dream of publishing a book that no one else will read? Is it any wonder that tenured faculty preach socialism, since they are the one cohort in America that is actually living it?
Imagine millions of American young people being taught year in, year out that the country you live in is actually a lie—a Big Lie—and had that message reinforced through the entertainment they watched, the occasional news program that they might view, the online insanity that they are addicted to viewed for hours at a time, and no one bothered to teach them any differently.
What would that look like?
Short answer: the United States of America, circa November 2025.
How else do you explain the love being shown for the young adult, cold-blooded assassin of the CEO of an insurance company he did not like? This guy has T-shirts made in his honor after gunning down a husband and father from behind on a city street. Crowdfunders have thrown more than $1 million at this sniveling coward’s legal defense fund. The website actually directs donors to consult with tax professionals to determine tax deductibility for their contributions. What’s next? A commemorative coin?
If you think this is anything new, take a look at how criminal psychopath John Brown was lionized after he and his little band of fellow fanatics hacked five pro-slavery Kansans to death with swords in 1856. Brown was left to his own devices and later led an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the United States government in 1859.
We have discussed some of the intellectual background of the prevalence of Hate in our society today.
Next time, we will take a look at the ways that Hate has become its own religion.