Why now?

Simple. They got their candidate into the top spot so they think they are free to swing for the fences with any of their woke (i.e. anti-American) drivel.

They are mostly right about that. It will take a number of really bad outcomes to wake the woke!

The author states that Americans oppose discrimination but then says they accept the privileges/advantages bestowed on blacks. This is a logical fallacy that shows a lack of awareness.

Good thoughts Paul.

CRT is just giving blacks a list of new excuses for their failures. It is a more sophisticated was to say "the white man is keeping you down". From my standpoint as a white guy, it seems it is safest for me to have as little contact and interaction with black people as possible in order to lessen their opportunity to be offended by something I say or do and call me racist. This will not end well.

This explanation ignores the documented history of CRT. It is Marxism and Marxists are gonna Marx.

There's no need to wonder why things will tend to get worse, not better. CRT is based on hate and feeds our basest perceptions, not our higher ones based on love for our fellow man.

Math is hard. Rioting and looting are easy. Especially when you are told by all the "smart" ones that you are entitled to something for nothing, and are encouraged to break laws and act like savage animals, with no punishment for doing things that any civilized person would agree are evil and not good.

"There are limits to how much absurdity even White leftists can accept." I disagree. This sounds like the Jews who stayed in Germany in the 20s and 30s believing there were limits to how much anti Semitism the Nazis could inflict. When race hatred is the centerpiece of your political philosophy and the root cause of all the misery you experience, well, there is always a final solution.

"Republicans and their friends in the media need a new scare tactic because they don't want to talk about the economy or how we crushed the virus.," Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) claimed while speaking against the “Say No to Indoctrination Act”.

That didn't age well

Desperation? Nah. It's Marxist revolutionary strategy. As well as letting criminals loose on the streets, flooding the country with aliens, masking the population, weaponizing a virus, allowing China to infiltrate all levels of our culture and economy, trans gender politics, and on and on. It's just another weapon in their arsenal. We are being Cloward-Piven(ed) from all sides. This has zero to do with black people and their current situation and everything to do with solidifying the Marxist revolution which many of the so-called elite have been plotting for decades. The dots are now being connected by many people. A "movement" here. A "movement" there and now the big picture begins to appear. The left has taken pieces of our culture and the cultural institutions which represent tradition and has flipped them and turned them upside down. One here. Another there. Slowly, little by little, over time, they have triumphed. That is what's known as the "long game." So if CRT seems to have come at America from out of nowhere, it hasn't. It has just been waiting to makes its debut.

BTW - whites are no longer a big majority. In many instances they are a plurality. Over fifty years ago they were over 96% of the country. How racist is America if a demographic has been systematically reduced and has not fought back against THAT form of racism? A demographic that has stood by as it watched itself being disappeared?

Why would the Left be desperate? Somewhere near half the country seems to have forgotten last summer - with the active help of the Republican party that pushed those memories down the hole - and they only need near to half with their voter fraud system in place and unchallenged.

So many Never-Trumpers and cruise ship conservatives - who always lecture us about how smart and educated they are - have not a clue about the significance of the American Reichstag Fire now burning in Washington.

After half a century the quota regime has run its course. These are its death spasms.

Seriously? Seems like it’s gaining steam to me.

Commenters have mentioned that whites are no longer The Majority, but a plurality. Similarly, blacks are no longer The Minority, but only one among minorities. The answer (Nondiscrimination + Affirmative Action) devised for a binary 90/10 Majority/Minority situation in the 1960s can't deliver the wished-for result in the more complex world of the 2020s. A revolt against it was to be expected, either from the white side (end quotas) or from the black side (do everything by quotas).

Apparently, by pushing hard enough, CRT can make even someone like me a racist. Raised in a middle class area with lots of Black professionals, and having a brain, I never had an issue......... With anyone. But now, learning that after half a century during which I ACTUALLY passed professional exams and ACTUALLY passed promotional exams, I did so apparently due to my white skin, I guess I can celebrate as a racist. So be it. I now am a racist, being Jewish notwithstanding. Congrats, now where's my CAT tractor hat and chaw?

Terrific piece Paul. I'm passing this on to many others.

CRT cannot be reduced to absurdity because it starts at absurdity. The slightest token of approval for it is total insanity.

It's not an act of desperation, and their objective isn't to help blacks. They are blindly led by the communist left, who is again using race, just as they did in the 60's, to destroy the culture and country and rebuild it into the Marxist paradise they have always envisioned. There is nothing new in what they are doing. If they really wanted success for all races, they would advocate for the things that have proven successful. That is obviously not their objective.

CRT is proving an effective strategy for the radicals behind it because it plays so well to the desperation (and shame) of many blacks and to the feelings of guilt of so many whites (some of which is sincere; much of which is virtue signaling).

This question has an easy answer: Battle prep for reparations.

Why CRT now? 2 words--George Soros. Soros is behind all this, and his money is funding it. If our leaders wanted to stop this, they could stop it tomorrow by arresting and legally nullifying Soros and his minions. But no one seems to have an interest in this. Why not?

For one, it’s not just Soros, and arresting him will not—like some magic bullet—stop the neo-Marxist assault on the West and (classical) liberal values. Thus it is tactically mistaken. Leftists tend to shoehorn the give and take of politics into a contrived, simplistic narrative of boogeymen and heroes; let’s not do the same—in the first place, such a paradigm is woefully inaccurate.

For two, there is not a sound legal basis for arresting him. Although he funds a legion of minions whose ideology and actions are extremely destructive to the USA and the rest of the West, that does not amount a per se crime. They have a First Amendment right to proselytize the ignorati into the woke neo-religion. No, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, but it does allow its enemies a very wide latitude. This is, unfortunately, one of the insoluble paradoxes of liberal society.

Very well said.

>Frustration at the fact that doing the things, such as mastering math, that will “elevate young Blacks into the first class economically” has proven very
difficult.

Does anyone have a good explanation for this basic problem -- the failure of mastery of math (and the resultant failure to bring up SAT/ACT scores to competitive levels, which, if it happened, would end the need for affirmative action in post-secondary education)?

Affirmative action, CRT, etc., etc., are one massive workaround for this problem, which shouldn't be THAT dfficult to resolve, should it?

Unfortunately—hide the women and children, and switch to a secure channel—general intelligence (g) is highly heritable (at least 50% and up to 80+%), and this is not really debatable at this point. It is a very well established and often reproduced finding across a wide variety of conditions and tests; one of the strongest results in all of social science, though you won’t get that from any layman’s book or on your nightly newscast! G, which is often referred to as IQ, measures something real—it’s not some artifact of testing—and has excellent predictive power in a large set of applications at the individual and group levels, such as lifetime earnings, criminality, health, life expectancy, national GDP, etc. Also well established is that, for whatever reason, American blacks as a group (insert boilerplate apologies that every individual is unique) on average have been found to be one standard deviation lower on the intelligence scale than whites. This is one of two main prongs of the problem.

The second part is environmental but at least in part derivative of the first. American blacks for a variety of complicated reasons have lower cultural capital than other groups. This may be partly due to lingering effects from the past, but whatever the underlying causes, the forms of cultural deficiency include things like out of wedlock births, higher crime rates, less engaged parenting styles, less emphasis on education, etc. Teasing out cause and effect is difficult but undoubtedly there is an environmental feedback loop that tends to reinforce the pathologies rather than eliminate them. It’s also true that g also bears on human behavior and modulates these same pathologies up or down depending on whether g is high or low.

However, no one is allowed to discuss this in polite society and social scientists strive to suppress these well-known and well-supported findings from the general population out of some misplaced sense of fear that the yokels will go all Margaret Sanger on black people.

But because no one is allowed to speak honestly about the reality, we as a society never consider appropriate solutions. Instead, the gentry class promotes and idolizes midwit mediocrities like Ibram Kendi, who claims that any disparities among racial groups are ipso facto proof of racism. Thus the elites promulgate theories condemning America and inventing fictitious concepts like systemic racism to explain away the disparities. If you force people to ignore the gap in group intelligence—which again explains nor predicts nothing about individuals: there are many black geniuses and (copious) white idiots (cf. capo Joe Biden)—then those earnestly struggling to make things better for black Americans must be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that society is structurally biased against blacks and arranged to retard their progress. For if all groups are equal in intelligence and cultural capital, then the persistent, stubborn refusal of various gaps in achievement between black and white to close can only be explained by racism in people and/or the system.

But think about it: the people that are suppressing the reality (roughly synonymous with Democrats) are doing a grave disservice to everyone: to blacks who are being primed to believe the deck is stacked against them and they can’t succeed (but any individual can succeed: just because marginally more whites have marginally more success due to differences in intelligence means nothing for the probability of success of individual blacks); to whites who are fingered as inveterate racists—many of whom, unaware of or not believing the science (Dems are the Party of Science with a capital S, didn’t you know?) of intelligence and psychometrics, actually and genuinely believe they must be racist and beat themselves, and fellow whites, and the country up over supposed racism that is holding blacks down; to the government which spends trillions and distorts society with divisive programs like affirmative action on the one hand while stating that every group is perfectly equal (thus the tension that at some point none should need special treatment); while the country’s reputation and honor are damaged severely in the eyes of the world, as they see a great many people in our country claim that it is racist and oppressing blacks. The reality though is that this one simple variable, g, explains essentially all of the disparities in modern America between blacks and whites.

Note also that these two slightly offset normal distributions (black population g vs white population g), at the low and high ends, will produce, relative to each other, a preponderance of exceptionally smart whites and a preponderance of lower than average intelligence blacks. This leads to a severe imbalance in the numbers of blacks in certain fields and who advance to certain levels in their careers, etc. Then we get hand-wringing condemnations of these companies and organizations for discriminating against blacks, when the reality is that they are bending over backward to identify and promote even minimally-qualified blacks from a too-small candidate pool.

This is a somewhat similar effect that accounts for more men at the upper echelons of mentally challenging fields like physics, math, chess, etc. relative to women. It’s speculated that the stubby little male Y chromosome, which causes men to have only one copy of the sex-linked (23rd chromosome -> XY vs XX) genes, yields a wider variation in corresponding traits in males, since there is no “averaging” of the two copies of these genes as happens in females, and this is evolutionarily adaptive for the expendable males versus precious females who are vital for the propagation of genes to the next generation: the natural variation of males produces, relative to women, significantly more exceptional specimens (including some with exceptional intelligence) but also many more dolts, dummies, and weaklings at the other end of the scale, but, due to female hypergamy and alpha male cock-of-the-walk swagger, the dolts—at least back in the mists of prehistory and human evolution—are afforded no chances to breed, thus their inferior genes do not dilute the gene pool. Whereas females have less variation which also makes sense evolutionarily because every female will breed (sorry for describing it like that) since each womb is so precious and needs to be maximized, thus it makes sense to minimize the chance of inferior genes coming from the female by trading on a lower probability of superior genes—the idea is to let the variation come from the male, who, through sexual competition, tends to be superior. Larry Summers got fired for treading near this topic (Nancy Hopkins, if you’re reading this: you make me want to throw up a little in my mouth—I can’t even!) because just as in the case of whites vs. blacks, the elites don’t trust Americans with the truth—and admittedly there are many Democrats who do their utmost to avert their eyes and perpetuate the fantasy world they live in where the white male cisheteropatriarchy is responsible for all ills.

It can’t be overstated how pernicious the hiding of the truth is: it leaves blacks (and similarly women) with no good explanation for their group’s “plight” other than that the country must be structurally biased against them, and that this is because whites / men are racist / sexist. What a horrible smear! And there is a simple explanation that proves it is bogus, but the elites won’t allow it to be discussed in polite society. Instead of calmly explaining the facts, the elites propagate racial strife and distrust.

Think about it: the Left would rather invent and live in a world in which there is this special invisible power that no one can see or perceive but in which we are enveloped, like fish not knowing they are breathing water—or like fin de siècle physicists—very smart people all—who nevertheless convinced themselves of the existence of “aether”, a pervasive, invisible field that was responsible for the physical measurements (speed of light) they could not explain otherwise—only there was another way to explain the measurements, special relativity. But even after Einstein proposed the theory, many people, whose careers and reputations were built on the aether would not admit that they were wrong: they were too personally and professionally and economically invested in their pet theory, whether they still believed in it or not. This is very similar to the “systemic racism” that is posited to exist even though no one can see it or measure it: there are no racist laws on the books; discrimination on the basis of immutable characteristics is banned; many programs in and out of government afford special dispensations for blacks and other groups; countless blacks are extremely successful: indeed the American black population is the freest, richest, best-educated, longest-lived group of African ancestry in history. Unfortunately for the would be crusaders of SJW shock troop brigades, there are no more dragons to slay. Despite their anthropocentric arrogance in believing—needing to believe—that this time in history must be special (because they are alive during it), all the civil rights battles have already been won. Thus the increasingly silly spectacle of SJW-confected categories of oppressed: out-woking the wokest, makes you the new wokest. Thus all the “hate crime” hoaxes, with the demand for juicy racist content among the grievance industry far, far exceeding the supply.

EDIT: I neglected to mention that one can find all this information laid out in careful detail on various websites, and the psychometric arguments are laid out in The Bell Curve from 1994(?), which is why the Left determined that its authors should have their reputations destroyed despite the fact that they were just unflinchingly going where the data took them, like real scientists, as opposed to the sheep-in-the-sheepfold-like behavior of the vast majority of social “scientists “, not out of animosity against blacks—far from it—but from a desire to comprehend the truth and help initiate the discussion of real solutions. Though I hasten to add that just because there is a perceived or real disparity between one group and another does not automatically imply that it must be “fixed”—who says there is something per se “wrong” with natural variation and differences? And thank God for differences or life would be quite boring! And anyway it is a fool’s project to strive for perfect balance among all groups in all things at all times because it is logically impossible to achieve (actually I built a little proof of this years ago so you’ll trust me when I tell you it simply can’t be done—there’s always another way to construct a new group (aka set)—sort of like when my buddy at work tried to convince me that he had some new method for compressing data to unimaginably small sizes and unheard of compression rates and copying data over a network channel, by using sequences of keys that indexed into a hash on either side that contained preset codebooks of blocks of different data patterns, and I regretfully had to disabuse him of his dream of a patent and untold riches by giving him a copy of A Mathematical Theory of Communication—hey, at least he got there 15 years before Silicon Valley—and pointing out that his keys themselves would have to grow to rival the size of the data blocks they were replacing, thus limiting the possible compression ratio—this is known as the Shannon limit—but I digress, badly). Nor does it imply that, even if we agree that something could reasonably be done, that the government, and only the government, must address the issue.

Also directly relevant is Murray’s recent book, Facing Reality, which I have not read but is advertised as dealing directly with the gap in average IQ and it’s effects. Of course, literally none of this information is new, but it is suppressed with such police state discipline and Nork-like fervor by certain sectors of the Left that very few people know about it and many of them are brainwashed (as Julius Caesar wrote, fere libenter homines, id quod volunt credunt) into thinking that it is somehow racist to have a frank acknowledgment of reality, and that the better course of action is to keep our heads in the sand, impugn our country as racist, vilify whites as racist, and perpetuate the situation of black Americans, feeding them the lie, for Democrat electoral gain, that the country is rigged against them and they shouldn’t bother trying to succeed, thus ensuring our national discourse stays locked in a stasis borne of an artificially limited range of discussion (a vice-like åsiktskorridor the walls of which all the best people aka Twitterati blue-checks can perceive like a sixth sense, like bats in a cave (who are then captured by the Chinese for a PLA bioweapons program, but I digress…)), in which no one will ever propose a solution that might help/work, because no one is even allowed to state the problem. Bravo, woke gentry class ignorati!

Like the Doors, I’m waiting for the sun, the light of knowlege, to illuminate this twilight debate heretofore conducted in hushed tones at the back of conference rooms and in snatches of candid admission and admonition, to cast its light and drive out the shadow and forced ignorance that has reigned for too long. Until we talk candidly about these uncomfortable facts—until we have those “courageous conversations” the diversicrats keep claiming to want, the American people will be pulled further and further apart by the strength of the lie of systemic racism.

Though, as much as I believe in its necessity I cannot in good conscience advise anyone to attempt a true conversation about this at work, or school, or government—too many people have been conditioned to short circuit when this topic is broached and you therefore may provoke a hysterical reaction. Sadly we are now operating in our society like Havel’s greengrocer, where the gap between public declaration and private sentiment continues to grow. The increasingly divergent public (propaganda) and private (truth) spheres a hallmark of totalitarian societies through time. Again, bravo American elites! But when, like Tiffany said, I think we’re alone now, and we two can talk honestly, face to face, without that pesky censorship bot Alexa to report us for unclean thoughts crimes, then we’ll work it out…

This really deserves to go viral.

Double or triple wow! A totally sentient and amazingly true/accurate comment on EXACTLY where we find ourselves today... Well done... I hope you don't mind that I have copied this and will in fact use it in whole or part at a later time and other places?? I WILL cite the source as well as possible... You deserve full credit and marks. Hopefully, this one passage can in fact be a spark that starts a revolution.

Wow, I didn't expect such a comprehensive response. Much to think about. Thank you.

Yes it's a Hail Mary. Blacks (that is, the historical African-American) is 13% of the population and, beyond certain sports/entertainment figures, less than that in economic muscle. Other groups are growing in numbers, and far more in economic and political muscle, groups that regard black Americans, as a group if not necessarily as individuals, as something between a nuisance and a menace.

This is the last big push to legally and culturally embed Black preferences in culture and law before they're kicked to the sidelines.

I have to agree. When I, a Jew, shop at H Mart, the Korean supermarket or my local Spanish speaking shop, there's really no stress. Disputes are minor and there are no "beefs" or problems. Everyone who sees can see who starts stuff here in NYC and NYS, and to a great extent, it ain't who's looking at them in the mirror.

And yet, my Black friends are great and all the good things we love about Americans. My nice Black friends always double lock all their doors because they're in more Black areas. My Black friends sweat their kids growing up.

But in the end, it's their community, and their problem. They know it and so does everyone else. God help them, and us.

You nailed it. The black community has problems that are largely self inflicted, and therefore only they can solve for themselves.

Well said.
"For every problem there is a solution that is clear, simple and wrong." HL Mencken.
In the real world problems are complex with interdependent chains of causes and effects.
Focusing on any one thing in the chain is just treating symptoms.

The solution will be complex and will take time. But it will take the mutual efforts of everyone involved.

not desperation ... they are racists and can openly proclaim it now under Biden ...

My theory is that almost everything that liberals have pushed after the Civil Rights Act has Made Things Worse.

But nobody in politics ever admits a mistake. So...

I am absolutely convinced that EVERY person that pushes CRT, BLM, systemic racism, etc. etc. etc. is like a coin. On one side is the drivel about racism, the other side is the most superior inferiority complex ever seen. EVERY argument that can be made for racism that you don't even know you have, can also be made for an inferiority complex. And if you insist you don't have an inferiority complex, that just proves that you have one.

I lived in the Bay Area through the 60s and 70s. All was well at first, but in the 1970s a change came. The Black Panthers. Huey Newton was on the radio telling blacks not not act like white people. I also heard rumor that black students who were doing well in school were being harassed by being called "oreos". The effort to prevent black youth from being properly educated was a central feature of the black movement at that time. It has resurfaced in BLM and Woke.

CRT is not being pushed in desperation. It’s a blitzkrieg by the left, and CRT is the left flank to the covid center-front.

”Why has it just now taken center stage in the quest for Black advancement?“

Mr Mirengoff, I apologize for zeroing in on a seemingly ancillary point, especially because I am in firm agreement with the thrust of your post, and you may have mentioned your rationale for thís before, but I just have to register how off-putting it is for me for you, a proprietor of one of the most popular and influential conservative news/opinion sources in the world, to be led around by the nose by the New Church of Woke Orthodoxy and their ever-shifting style guide, which, with the acolytes in the press in the throes of a moral panic last year that would make even Charles Mackay blush, was updated with the commandment that henceforth and for entirely specious reasons, black must be capitalized (‘Black’) but white cannot—must not—be equally capitalized. When did you decide to capitulate to the mandarins of language policing? Why should we cede the solid ground of regular usage—which, by the way, is perfectly acceptable and without a hint of racist history, intent, or even subjective, tendentious perception—to their marauding army and surrender the crucial fight over who gets to define the terms: the wider society through the natural, spontaneous process of language evolution, or the tiny clique of partisans of this church who continually attempt to force their ideology onto everyone else, most of whom are naive and unsuspecting, unlike you, who should know better?

I agree but he capitalizes both.

Don't act white. Be illiterate.

"It’s easy to understand the psychology of CRT’s theory and demand. But as a strategy for advancement, CRT seems badly misguided even on its own premise."

Ok....let me break this down for you.

CRT is being pushed largely by whites. This has nothing to do with the advancement or reconciliation of past wrongdoings....but the furtherance of raw political power and as a vessel for dealing with guilt in the same manner as Christianity (original sin). It is also Marxism, which is a means to its own end. You mix all this together and you get your average upper middle class professional liberal white.

Speculation here....but if you were to do an analysis of the whites who supported segregation in the deep South and the ones currently in, let's say, the VA suburbs voting for liberal Democrats and supporting BLM they would be the same people. This was never about race.....but fear and power.

Divide and conquer.

It is impossible not to consider the US as a racist Country through mandates by executive order, the courts and settled law that all are based on the concept of 'affirmative action', or the basing of hiring or employment that provides targets or quotas for sex, race and ethnicity as guidelines.
This is out and out racism. There is no getting around it.
Allowing and condoning one form of racism to counter past conditions of racism is not a cure to the mistreatment of those hurt.

"Frustration at the fact that doing the things, such as mastering math,
that will “elevate young Blacks into the first class economically” has
proven very difficult. Anger that Blacks, to a disproportionate extent,
aren’t moving into that class."
The DNC has always intentionally designed that frustration. I'm sure we could all list the ways, perhaps the author forgot.

Not only CRT but other goals in the Left's millenarian crusade become more absurd over time for the simple reason that they have never, and apparently will not ever, question the premises from which they began. If you believe that racism is built into the American psyche rather than being a failure of human nature against which much progress has been made, things never improve. Rage rules.

And who did the most to lift blacks out of poverty, Paul? Hint: He also wrote mean tweets.

This author and many others believe in a struggle of ideas. That is true to the extent it is useful to explain why incorrect ideas are incorrect.

But is essential always to remember that the proponents of these ideas care not for truth or falsity, but only for power and all the benefits power brings them.

The theory is that Whites are to blame for Blacks not succeeding to the same extent as Whites.

So are Asians to blame for Whites not succeeding to the same extent as Asians?

When you tell your kids that they can never succeed because of "racism", guess what? They believe it, and they never succeed.

This is what the left has done to a couple of generations of black kids.

I think CRT is a logical extension of Obama's strategy after Travon & Ferguson and Biden's incompetence. Exaggerating the amount of racism in the US was a good way for Obama to make sure blacks voted. It worked for Obama, but it won't work for Biden because Biden isn't smart enough to be subtle. CRT could help Democrats if it doesn't overtly challenge all whites by saying that all white voters and their children are irredeemable racists. CRT will backfire the way it's being used by the radicals ruling for Biden.

Since CRT is being pushed by avowed Marxists, the obvious reason why they are pushing it is to destroy America by fomenting race war and weakening the consensus about American values that keeps America unified. This isn't about helping blacks - it's about destroying America.