Truth Exchange’s (TruthXchange) layman-friendly, academic discussion between its director, Dr. Peter Jones, and Australia’s Dr. Stephen Chavura is a worthwhile look at the surreptitious cognitive devices, and distortions, being used to undermine healthy tradition in Western societies.
The hour-long podcast, entitled ‘The Great Awokening: Being Woke in a Post-secular society’, is a “Wokeness 101” crash course. Discussing the jargon, and ideological foundations of Leftist constructs such as “white fragility”, “systemic racism”, who are the Frankfurt school, John Dewey’s possible connection to that Marxist movement, and its progeny: Cultural Marxism.
Jones outlined how the absence of well-defined terms automatically negate terms like ‘systemic racism’ because its founded on subjective ambiguity.
This “vagueness” was bolstered by “questionable examples” which are also used to prop up generalizations.
In order to prove the existence of systemic racism – the belief that “all institutions are solely programmed to benefit white people” – advocates have to use melanin as a measuring stick in order to give their argument the appearance of credibility.
This vagueness necessitates the art of embellishment, and the overlooking of irony.
Jones argued that “being called systemic racism based on white melanin is extremely simplistic” because skin colour is “crazy criterion.” Define whiteness.
Without a proper definition for systemic, there can be no intellectually honest justification for labelling a person, place or thing, as being proof of the existence of “white systemic racism.” Using melanin to judge an entire group of people as evil, for instance, is by definition racist.
For example, ‘white systemic racism’ asserts that racism is a sin condition that only plagues those born with white melanin.
Jones (rightly in my opinion) labelled this a product of “post-modern hermeneutics.” There is “no such thing as truth” means that destructive untruths can be given free reign. Evidence can be manufactured and made to look a certain way, as long as those with the power have control of the language and/or narrative.
Such as the abuse of language which calls abortion “healthcare”, and the once celebrated [violent] intellectual practice of revisionism (deconstructing, and remaking history, people, places and things in our own image, through a preferred subjective ideological lens).
For Jones this is the applied “theory of language as a use of power.”
Linking in Cultural Marxism, Chavura stated that Cultural Marxism, though it’s dismissed by critics as a “term invented by the Right”, “was an undeniable school of thought taking Marxist categories of oppressed and oppressor beyond the economic realm and applying to it other forms of oppression: gender, race, sexuality.”
Chavura added that we shouldn’t use the term Cultural Marxism without qualification and caution, but “anyone who says that C.M isn’t a thing, doesn’t really understand that this particular mindset, was, and is, very common in universities. Particularly from the 1960s onwards.”
The fruit of which we’re witnessing at work in society today with domestic attempts at overturning, and undermining Biblical Christianity and Western Civilization.
Disagreeing with Jones’ comment about a detachment of Cultural Marxism from Marxism proper, Chavura noted that it’s important not to “downplay the relationship. Cultural Marxism”, he affirmed, “comes out of Marxism.
This relationship is clearly present in Black Lives Matter’s hatred for capitalism. The economic dichotomy of Marx lives on in “Woke Theory” and the BLM movement, “promoting victimization” along with the noticeable “absence of forgiveness” and mercy.
In general, I found little to dislike or with which to disagree.
I wasn’t aware of the connection Jones makes between John Dewey, Marxism, and the Frankfurt movement.
In addition, I don’t share Stephen’s current pessimism about America. Underestimating the ability, capacity and faith of the American people, goes hand in hand with the historical caveats against invading Russia from the West during winter.
However, Chavura’s cautious optimism (self-described “pessimistic optimism”) does raise important critical questions. While he ‘believes in the resolve of Americans’ and (correctly) holds the view that the current contemporary context is, or is birthing a “Kairos Moment” for the Christian Church, he’s also a realist. Aware that ‘sometimes things need to get worse before they get better.’
I would add onto this discussion the crisis of Critical Race Theory. As well as the culture of suspicion spread by the Intersectionality rubric, which forces onto society an us vs. them ‘cognitive distortion.’ (Jonathon Haidt)
The: “you are what they say you are. You will do, think, speak, as they tell you to, or else!”
If, as Chavura has said, ‘the Middle-Class is being weaponized’, I don’t think it’ll be a weapon of mass destruction.
I don’t think the Middle-Class are fully capable of being turned into one.
If the Middle-Class is weaponized, it’ll be the weaponization of Middle-Class youth. Whose parents have long abdicated responsibility for what their children are learning.
If Cultural Marxism continues to march, recruit, and mobilize jackboots without challenge, the Middle Class are in for a great culture shock, as their youth seek to act out their indoctrination. Triggered into action by reflexes long conditioned through exposure to carefully positioned Marxists, manipulative propaganda, and the mass distortion of political education.
First published on Caldron Pool, 16th October 2020
©Rod Lampard, 2020.
In reference to Kyle Rittenhouse, The Australian reported that ‘Joe Biden accused Donald Trump of letting his supporters act as an armed militia.’
The opening sentence of Jacques Ellul’s, ‘Islam and Judeo-Christianity: A Critique of their commonality’, reads, ‘For nearly a decade, French intellectuals, generally speaking, have been seized with an excessive affection for Islam.’ (p.3)
Details about Simone Weil’s life and thought are enigmatic. Other than what’s included in the general encyclopedic biographies circling the internet, I know very little about her. Unlike someone such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, there is no long, authorised biography written by her friends. What knowledge I have been about to find out about her, is padded by what I’ve learnt from conversations with internet friends, whose admiration for her work has increased over the years.
