Spoiler: Your Company’s DEI Officer is a Party Commissar
A Deep Dive into the Historical Roots and Modern Implications of Critical Race Theory in America and its Praxis of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The City of College Park, Maryland’s Equity Officer, Kayla Aliese Carter recently added a header to her X account that read, "I can't wait for society to collapse so MY ideology can rise from the ashes!". In May 2020, she wrote, “Already planning (BEEN PLANNING) for how we will eat and live and grow after we burn it all down." There is no shortage of this type of language being used on social media by avowed ‘Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion’ (DEI) specialists.
But what ‘ideology’ is she referring to, and what does she want to “burn down”? Carter was hired by the city after it passed Resolution 20-R-16, which, “renounced systemic racism, declared support of Black lives, and called for the ongoing explicit and conscious confrontation of racism," shortly after the death of George Floyd in 2020. Her office is not unique, as ‘Equity’ and DEI officers are being hired by corporate, government, and non-profit sectors alike.
This is a relatively new occurrence, however. These roles only began popping up in the 2016 timeframe and the number of DEI-related job postings increased by 123% between May and September 2020, again following the death of George Floyd. If you’re at all familiar with the concept of Dialectic Materialism or Dialect Struggle, you understand that this was no coincidence. To fully comprehend how we got here - the point where you, the corporate employee, are made to undergo struggle sessions around race, gender, and what thought and speech is acceptable - we have to go back to 1934.
During the Chinese Civil War, the Communists were facing defeat at the hands of the Nationalists. To escape, the Communists conducted Mao’s Long March, a year-long 6,000 mile retreat to a defensible mountainous terrain, where they could retool, gather strength, and amass a comeback. This proved a successful strategy and solidified Mao Zedong as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), eventually allowing him to defeat the nationalists and usher in CCP rule.
This is a key event in communist history. And, it was an event well-known – and understood – by left-wing revolutionaries in the U.S., who conducted their own attempt at a specifically communist revolution in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. This revolution included figures like Angela Davis of the Communist Party USA, Bill Ayers, and Bernadine Dohrn of the Weather Underground (a Marxist terrorist group born out of the University of Michigan) who carried out bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon and robbed a Brinks truck - killing a security guard and two police officers. The Weather Underground originated the notion in America that all white infants were inherently marked by the "original sin" of "skin privilege," proclaiming that "all white babies are pigs." Does any of this sound familiar? Additionally, per the testimony of an informant in their ranks, these homegrown radicals estimated that 25 million Americans would need to be “eliminated” for their resistance to re-education. Deplorables, no doubt.
As the FBI broke these revolutionary factions within the U.S. and Nixon’s popularity surged, it became clear to Herbert Marcuse, a German American Marxist of the Frankfurt School and influential sociology professor, that the strategy of the long march must be implemented if the movement was to survive. By replicating Mao’s tactical retreat, the communist revolutionaries could find a stronghold where they would exist in relative obscurity: universities and government. Marcuse wrote of the notion, “To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working in them.” And so they did.
As those radicals previously mentioned and many others embedded in the universities, Angela Davis, a student of Marcuse, became an assistant professor at UCLA – although she was fired at the behest of then governor and Cold War anticommunist Ronald Reagan. Davis is now a full professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bill Ayers, after having bombed the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, also infiltrated the institutions. Ayers eventually entered the field of primary education, later becoming a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Education.
As the radicals reorganized in the spirit of Mao’s mountain retreat, they began to apply concepts like Marcuse’s linguistic therapy, which he described as “the effort to free words and thereby concepts from the all but total distortion of their meanings by the establishment,” which is to say, to distort the meanings of words and concepts in the founding of a new establishment. An example of this can be demonstrated by the distortion of the word racism, which has traditionally meant, “a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race”.
Today, thanks to Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DeAngelo, et al. that definition has moved toward an informal notion of racism being solely a mechanism of “white supremacy,” meaning: black people by default can’t be technically racist, white people are by default racist, though whites can earn salvation the way Ayers and Dohrn did - by bowing to the collective Maoist structure in acknowledging their guilt of the original sin of whiteness. As it happens, this exact same mechanism applies for blacks, women, gays, and any other intersectional identity in that, if any individual of any such identity fails to adopt the Marxist worldview, they aren’t really of that identity, but white supremacists, themselves.
Figures like Clarence Thomas, Riley Gaines, J.K. Rowling, Larry Elder, Dave Rubin, and Richard Grenell have clearly demonstrated this. Get the picture? It’s not about identity, as identity is merely the tool to collect momentum for the Maoist revolution; get on the bus or under it. Meanwhile, that bus is full of relatively worthless narcissists who hate one another for the sin of thinking the others could possibly be as victimized as they are themselves.
I was exposed to the techniques successfully employed by Marcuse, Davis, Ayers, and Dohrn as a prisoner of war in the training environment of Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training in my military career with Naval Special Warfare. These skills are most effective in demoralizing and indoctrinating while they begin with the simplest of steps: merely forcing the acceptance of a small lie and commencing the negotiation from there. Men can be women. Xe is a xir is a xem. Speech is violence.
I am thankful to an adept cadre of instructors who were deeply versed in these tactics and provided a type of inoculation to this virus that the public has not yet received. My work is an effort to duplicate that inoculation and mass produce it, which hopefully is the nonviolent solution to this pandemic of the mind.
Much of the framework for modern DEI language was drafted in the Prairie Fire Manifesto (a title which alluded to a quote from Mao), a 1974 publication by the Weather Underground. It included the concepts of “white-skin privilege”, “white supremacy”, “colonialism” and laid the groundwork for the grievance studies framework. Herbert Marcuse’s widow, Erica Sherover-Marcuse was pivotal in continuing her husband’s work in bringing academic theory into corporate practice. If you’ve ever been made to participate in a privilege walk as part of a struggle session, you can thank her. These decades-old Marxist concepts were then incubated within the halls of academia.
In a phenomenon resembling what many Gen Xers will recognize in which “Alternative Music” eventually just became “The Music,” so too did the majority of academic discipline over time get overrun and converted into its once alternative manifestation. There isn’t a social science field that isn’t now tainted by what Grievance Studies Affair veteran James Lindsey describes as “Maoism with American characteristics”. The Maoist model was adopted by Marcuse as a solution for the West because, as he rightly noted, capitalism worked in dissuading the working class from revolting, as was the Soviet model. So, Marcuse prescribed the Maoist cultural revolution model that killed tradition, and placed the struggle against different oppressor and oppressed identity classes as opposed to the Soviet class struggle of Proletariat against Bourgeoisie. Labor vs. Capital became Black vs. White, Man vs. Woman, Gay vs. Straight, etc.
As all of this infected the classroom through the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, it also infected the body of work in the social sciences. It did so by hacking the peer review system almost as a group of partisans might ratio someone on Twitter, as activist scholars continually cited one another’s work in a circular motion to generate volume so as to create a dominant force of published work and therefore change the literature altogether. Again, a thing may not be true, but if enough people aggressively repeat it, those who believe perception to be reality will be convinced.
During this period, many American parents, business professionals, and the more centrist-to-conservative leaning laughed off this phenomenon and assured one another that, “once those kids get out into the real world, they’ll be disabused of this nonsense.” But, while this was true to a point, each iterative year enough students clung to this worldview so as to transmit it, slowly, into the HR departments and halls of government.
Meanwhile, the concentration of new left in academia was so profound that there was no reason to use the term, as “scholarship” and “radicalism” were now synonymous. The former students of Marcuse et al. reached out to one another in their professional ecosystems and began to further build infrastructure between the state, corporations, and nonprofit organizations while cannibalizing many of those bridges already in existence from post-war military-industrial complex corporatism. The large corporations were happy to bear the cost of DEI departments within their organization as it provided a cost barrier that smaller competitors couldn’t bear, further cementing their dominance in the corporatist relationship with the state. These proved to be the most effective barriers in enforcing a type of fascist corporate control combined with the most contagious strains of Maoism. So it was no coincidence when Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer introduced Barack Obama as her chosen successor at a fundraiser at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
Presidential candidate Barack Obama, while still serving a first term in the U.S. Senate, emerged quickly onto the national stage with his wife, Michelle. The two had met as associates at the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley & Austin, where Bernadine Dohrn also worked in the same period. Small world, indeed. In her campaign speech in support of her husband, she explained, "Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation…” [linguistic therapy], “…we're going to have to change our traditions, our history…” [by killing off the four olds as Mao did] “…we're going to have to move into a different place as a nation." This, when coupled with Obama’s promise to “fundamentally transform America” should paint a more vivid picture, given the detailed history herein.
The Obama administration began with the incorporation of figures like White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who regarded Mao as her favorite philosopher and who extolled his virtues to a high school audience. Other cabinet officials, manufacturing “czar” Ron Bloom who agreed with Mao’s philosophy in opposition to markets, and FCC diversity chief Mark Lloyd had also publicly praised communist leader Hugo Chavez and called his rise to power “an incredible revolution” in a seemingly coordinated effort to pepper the media narrative with allusions to Maoism and to create a buzz around it, which it most certainly did. And, indeed, many on the political left, from Van Jones to Harold Ford Jr. demonstrated an affection for Mao the way Americans might revere the founders. And the lesson quickly learned was that the media yet to be fully captured raised the alarm such that open Maoism wasn’t yet palatable to the general public. They would need to be more subtle, to change the conversation toward critical consciousness – consciousness as in, to awaken, or to become ‘woke,’ as it were.
By the end of Obama’s first term, a struggle session upheaval at the New York Times began to bear fruit. The old guard was deposed and the young agents of the new left concentrated the organization’s focus on starting the Prairie Fire that had been prescribed in 1974. As the Gray Lady went, so did its competitors as terms like ‘White Privilege,’ ‘Whiteness,’ ‘Racial hierarchy,’ and ‘White Supremacy’ spiked exponentially in the wake of the same operation of volume that tipped the scales of the social science corpus.
To fully understand the dynamic at play and the headline of this article, which is not hyperbole, one must understand the culture of communism in Russia and China, as well as many of its offshoots in Cuba, Cambodia, and North Korea. As the Communist Party came to power in each, there was a fundamental transformation that took place. Political Commissars were party officials who were inserted into everyday life, and indeed into the workplace, to ensure full worker participation in party life and ensuring party-approved thought and speech were enforced. Party flags in each of the affected countries were prominently displayed to reinforce the party line.
Now is a pivotal time in American history to speak up. The issue is coming to the forefront and, while the traditional media, academia, and the Federal Government under this administration are all in on DEI, the corporate world is beginning to hedge on the Maoist structural takeover of the workplace. Many Americans have, to date, suffered from the Abilene paradox, which occurs when a group collectively goes down a path that conflicts with the desires of most or all members. Each of them mistakenly thinks their preferences don’t align with the majority. Individuals fail to voice their true opinions or even express support for an outcome they don't actually desire.
If you want to learn more about the origins of DEI, the long march through the institutions and how to prevent its further spread, James Lindsey, Christopher Rufo, and Xi Van Fleet are key contributors on these subjects.
You’ve been given the receipts; speak now for the nation you will have taken part in saving. DEI seeks to burn your country down, but you have more fire extinguishers than they have matches, if only you will use them.
Brooks Crenshaw is a writer, columnist, and speaker who focuses primarily on philosophy, economics, and policy while serving as a manufacturing and technology consultant. With a background as a Naval Special Warfare intelligence professional and an economic advisor and Director of Research for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, he holds an MBA from Vanderbilt University.
Let's set up some truth at this table and have a discussion… a tremendous read.