Bari Weiss again proves that she is the best actual journalist working in America today.
Last week, I wrote about Donald McNeil and how he does not seem to understand the culture of his former employer, The New York Times. And how he allowed himself to be cowered by it. It is hard to have sympathy for McNeil. But what if you do see what is going on? I mean the wokeness, the critical race theory, the anti-capitalism, white fragility, all of it. The pronouns! And yet you decide to inflict these ideas, not upon yourself, but rather upon your children.
Yes, it is bad enough that parents are tacitly, or actively, supporting this nonsense. But worse, is this not a form of child abuse?
Indoctrination used to be a term we conservatives jokingly applied to the college experience. Then it was not a joke anymore. Now, it is not just found at the college level, but all the way down to preschool. Here's how Weiss ends the piece:
I have a friend in New York who is the mother to a four-year-old. She seems exactly the kind of parent these schools would want to attract: A successful entrepreneur, a feminist, and a diehard Manhattanite. She’d dreamed of sending her daughter to a school like Dalton. One day at home, in the midst of the application process, she was drawing with her daughter, who said offhandedly: I need to draw in my own skin color. Skin color, she told her mother, is really important. She said that’s what she learned in school.
And this nonsense will not remain confined in America's elite schools. It's coming to your school too. And mine. Weiss could have been writing about Soviet schools. Or maybe she was. Love how she starts the piece talking about the dissidents. Because that is exactly what they are. Dissidents meeting in secret? We've read about that before.
Soviet dissidents were worried about being shipped off to some Siberian gulag, thereby risking their job, their family and friends, and their social position.
These dissidents are worried about being labeled racist. Mind you, not being racist; merely labeled racist. And in today's society, there is nothing worse. It does not matter if it is true; the label itself is the death knell. Being labeled racist, people risk their jobs, their family and friends, and their social position.
Soon all rational people will be dissidents. This ideology is seeping into our workplaces and our governments and our culture at large. We will all be shamed if we veer off narrative.
Shame, legitimate or not, serves as our gulag. And for the woke disciples, truth matters as much as it did for the Soviet disciples.
The irony is that this is a gulag of our own making.
Comrades, what are we going to do about it?
Update, Tuesday, 16 March 2021
Weiss updates her piece here: Rich People Problems, where she includes this nugget:
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Worth considering. But the problem is, if you have a smart kid who wants to be a doctor, you must go the indoctrination university route. On the other hand, if you have a smart kid who wants to be an entrepreneur, I think Urban's advice is pretty solid.